Renegades (2022)

I'd been waiting on this one since I reviewed Nemesis (2021), but unfortunately ended up waiting a bit too long, as the screener screenwriter Tom Jolliffe had Shogun Films send me unfortunately ended up in my spam folder. Luckily I decided to check there two weeks later, found it, and am now able to make this review happen. 

Renegades has the great Lee Majors as a former Green Beret who's murdered by a gang run by Louis Mandylor, after Majors tries to get them to leave his daughter, Patsy Kensit, alone. This is right after he helps Nick Moran, a down on his luck former special forces soldier whose father served with Majors, and when Moran hears of the murder, he goes to Majors's former fellow soldiers, Billy Murray, Ian Ogilvy, and Paul Barber, so they can exact their revenge on Mandylor. At the same time, Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott is a police detective who's been trying to take Mandylor down, and when she discovers that Moran and crew are going after Mandylor, she has a decision to make: stop them so she can do her job and let the law handle it, or stand back and see if these older former soldiers can do what the law can't. Will they prevail?

This was fantastic. When I reviewed Nemesis earlier this year, both Jonathan Sothcott and Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott told me if I enjoyed that, I'd love this, and they were right. Simple concept: evil, ruthless baddie, against a fun, ragtag group of underdog heroes that you can't help rooting for, and I think this would've been great on its own if that's all this was; but from there, the performances were great, even from the cameos like Danny Trejo and Michael Pare; plus the way the story grew organically, allowing for the nuance to develop in certain aspects, like what Nick Moran's character was going through as a former soldier trying to make it in civilian life. It's the kind of thing a churn-and-burn DTV actioner wouldn't have the bandwidth to pull off, but here it's handled with a level of depth and allowed to flourish in a way I didn't come in expecting. There were other aspects I appreciated as well, like how we get the scene of Mandylor beating up a rival gang member he captured cut with and juxtaposed with the scene of Moran's character talking to the other guys about what he's been going through, trying to move onto civilian life after the war. It was like we had two distinct forms of intensity, one that's more common in an action film, and one that we might see more in an indie drama, and we're shuttling back and forth between both. As a device I liked it, because it allowed those more dramatic elements to flourish without weighing the film down in what is ultimately an action film. This might not be the best film for Christmas, but considering we all get the 26th off this year, I can't think of a better way for us Yanks to celebrate Boxing Day than to fire this one up.

When I reviewed Nemesis I was really big on Nick Moran's performance, and he came back in this and was even better. The opening of the film is anchored by him, and he really leans into who that character is, so it was great to see him hit that out of the park. As I mentioned above, I also liked the way the story moved organically, it allowed Moran's character's past to take on a depth that we wouldn't see in most DTV flicks, and I think that's important. My wife and I were watching an old episode of Emergency! recently, and it had the trope of the crazed Vietnam vet who's violent and seeing ghosts, and while we've come a long way in our depiction of veterans in popular media, the idea of the combat vet suffering from PTSD is one that's often handled in films in a way that's too reductive, which then often leads it to being exploitative. The fact that this film didn't do that with Moran's character was refreshing, but I also think a sign of how the people working at Shogun Films not taking the churn-and-burn approach to film making can give us something like this more nuanced, three-dimensional hero, so I'm looking at it and saying "this isn't the usual bearded, grimacing, white guy former special forces dude I'm used to seeing, this guy has me pulled in and invested, and I'm ready to see him and everyone else through the rest of this film." When I talked with screenwriter Tom Jolliffe about his previous film When Darkness Falls, and the previous Shogun film Nemesis, he mentioned the slow burn aspect both of those films had. I think Tom's screenplay here does a great job of drawing on that slow burn aspect enough to let things grow organically, even if the action kicks in sooner than it does in those others; but for the slow burn to work, even in the more limited capacity in which it's used here, it needs a performance like Moran's, plus the directing and editing that trusts it'll all work, and we definitely get all of it.

Speaking of the directing, Daniel Zirilli is a name that's popped up on our site quite a bit, so when I found out he was working with Shogun Films and Jonathan Sothcott on this, I was excited to see what would come of that collaboration. The last Zirilli-directed film we looked at on the site was the Dolph flick Acceleration, and while I enjoyed that, I didn't enjoy it as much as this because it had too many other elements that weighed the film down when it didn't need to, while this had a simple premise that I think they were able to add elements to--like Moran's character's development--in ways that didn't impede the fun and the action, which ended up enhancing the film overall. Like I've been doing with Shogun Films, I've also been following Zirilli on Instgram, and it's fun to see what projects he's working on and who he's working on them with. In that sense, like Sothcott, Jolliffe, and the rest of Shogun, Zirilli's a fellow fan who's making these movies for fans like us, and it's great to see it all come together like it did here.

Also from Nemesis we have Billy Murray and Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, with Murray as a part of the crew of retired soldiers, and Nerissa Sothcott as the Scotland Yard Detective trying to take Mandylor's crime syndicate down. Having Murray with Paul Barber and Ian Ogilvy really made that gang extra fun, which not only made it easy for us to root for them and be invested in their success, but also worked as a good juxtaposition from Moran's more serious character. I could see Murray in anything really, so to see him turning in such a fun performance is even better. With Nerissa Sothcott's character, I think because the only other main female character was Patsy Kensit's, and she was more set up as the damsel in distress at the end, we needed Sothcott's to make the film less boys club-ish. I also really liked how they used her character as the bridge to get Michael Pare's cameo in the film, because it both got us Pare in a way that worked, but also set up her character less as someone passively letting Moran and company take care of her Mandylor problem for her, but rather strategically weighing her options on whether or not this is a good play. Finally, with the human trafficking element to Mandylor's crime syndicate, Nerissa Sothcott's character also prevents the film from being too "women are helpless and need their White Knight male heroes to come and save them," and we especially get this kind of mitigation when Mandlyor's character makes a crack about Sothcott potentially dancing for him at his club, and she shuts him down. This is another area where Shogun gets it right. Most DTV flicks would take her role, whittle it down to a day's worth of shooting, and get a big name like Pare to play it so they can stick him on the tin. Instead, Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott takes the part and invests more in it, and the result is something we didn't know we needed, but helps to give the film more depth and make it more enjoyable--plus we still get our fun Pare cameo too.

Finally, two last points. First, I liked the way the film used London as a character by giving us these beautiful establishing shots of the city, the images we in the rest of the world think of when we hear "London;" and then jumping down into the grittier underbelly of gangs and organized crime that me on my 1997 class trip there was oblivious to--though I did see a man speeding the wrong way up a street in a stolen car, so there was that. The other piece was the use of Mandylor's character as an outsider by being an Aussie. Too often in the States films use African American or Latin American gangs as a way to depict this concept of the outsider "invading" a neighborhood, from which the overtones and dog whistles are obvious. Having the character be from a Commonwealth country though, we could have the outsider "invading" London aspect without the racism that usually comes with that approach. To further divorce it, we have Danny Trejo's character playing someone who's an adopted Londoner further depicting Mandylor and his gang as the outsiders. I don't know that this was a conscious decision, or more like "we have Louis Mandylor as the baddie, what can we do with that?" but I appreciated the way it worked out.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now, you can get this through VOD in the States, and I think it's also available on Blu-ray in Germany. For the UK, January 30th it'll be available as well. This is well worth checking out. You can support indie filmmakers and enjoy a fun actioner while you do it. What's better than that?

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11696276

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Nemesis (2021)

This is one I've been meaning to get to for some time, especially since it's been available on Tubi here in the States. I remember when Shogun Films was first in the process of making it, they were posting updates on their Instagram page, building a lot of anticipation, so I'm glad now I'm finally able to make it happen. In addition to us, our friends Todd Gaines at Bulletproof Action, and the guys at DTV Digest have also covered this. 

Nemesis has Billy Murray as John Morgan, a London crime kingpin who returns to the city after spending some time abroad. He and his wife Sadie (Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott) are attending a charity dinner, then hoping to meet their daughter's (Ambra Moore) girlfriend (Lucy Aarden). As you can imagine though, a crime kingpin with the career and success that Morgan has had would create many enemies, including disgraced police detective Nick Moran, Morgan's own brother (Frank Harper), and a rival kingpin who Murray kicks his earnings up to, Bruce Payne. All of these chickens come home to roost during Morgan's family dinner, and the question is, will he be able to make it out alive?

This felt like Shogun Films announcing their arrival, the kind of first film from a production company that lets you know they're only getting started. The biggest element for me was the characters, both how they were written and the actors playing them. Starting with Billy Murray is always a solid bet, and then they surrounded him with other UK stalwarts like Nick Moran, Bruce Payne, Frank Harper, and even Julian Glover; but also Lucy Aarden and Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, who both don't have the experience those other names have, really held their own. I think from a story standpoint, a home invasion dynamic is always difficult to pull off, because we can only keep the players in that situation for so long before we feel like we're spinning our wheels; but I liked the attempt to mitigate that by devoting the first 45 minutes of the film to building the backstory, which created more of a slow burn vibe. Also this movie moves in some different directions from your standard home invasion or gangster film. Sothcott's Sadie is grittier and has more edge than the usual mobster wife, which made her a great wild card in this scenario; and I liked how I wanted to root for Billy Murray because he's so great, but here are Lucy Aarden and Nick Moran's characters to keep me from liking him. This really worked for me, and is worth checking out, at least on Tubi.

Nick Moran was one of my favorite parts of this. Here on our site, we usually only get to see him in the Billy Murray or Bruce Payne gangster role, which I also enjoy, but his job here as disgraced detective Frank Conway was fantastic. The movie is more centered on John Morgan and the chickens he has coming home to roost--one of which is supposed to be Moran--but Moran's performance elevates it beyond that. He was also great as the guy below Craig Fairbrass in Avengement, but I think that's the role we expect Moran to do and which he's always great at. What makes a movie like this work is when someone like a Moran plays someone we're not as used to him playing and he hits it out of the park.

With mafia movies and TV shows, there's a tradition of the gangster's wife being almost as iconic as the gangster himself. The thing that I liked about Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott's Sadie, is unlike Carmela Soprano, Karen Hill, or Kay Adams, Sadie felt like she had a grittiness to her that came from coming up in the same world Murray's John Morgan does. Out of those three, maybe Karen Hill would be the kind of wild card Sadie was during the home invasion, but even she wouldn't have had the edge Sadie did. Even though this film takes place in London and involves English gangsters, cinematically it can still be hard to get out from under the shadow of The Sopranos, Goodfellas, and The Godfather, but I thought the character of Sadie was one area where the film did that successfully, and Sothcott's performance added an element that we needed to keep us in suspense in the home invasion construct.

None of this works without Billy Murray in the lead. I remember when Shogun Films was giving us teasers on Instagram, there was one of Murray getting fitted for a suit, and there was a sense then that this could be good, but Murray is something else here. I didn't picture him gleefully setting a car on fire with someone who crossed him strapped inside when we were seeing those behind the scenes Instagram posts. Even his gangster walk as he's heading down the hallway to meet with Bruce Payne was one of those added touches I didn't know I needed. As the center around which everything else orbited, he had to be compelling, and he didn't leave anything to chance in his performance. From there we have Moran, Sothcott, Frank Harper, and Lucy Aarden all acting opposite him, and he becomes like a sun, where anything in his orbit that gets too close gets burned; but also in Sothcott and his daughter's case, (played by Ambra Moore, granddaughter to my favorite Bond, Roger Moore), he can give life too, and Murray plays that duality so well.

Finally, when I first started the DTVC back in 2007, one of the first sites that linked us was Bruce's Angels, a site that two women ran who were huge fans of Bruce Payne. I remember that was back in the MySpace days, and I had this cheap computer that had almost no RAM. They posted this big flashing Bruce Payne gif on my MySpace wall, and it froze my computer so I had to delete it. I felt so guilty, because it was such a nice gesture on their part. That was just before Kenner at Movies in the Attic also pinged me on MySpace to tell me how much he dug the site, but at that time I had no idea that my site would bring me into contact with so many people, and the woman at Bruce's Angels were just the start of that. Even though their site is no longer live, I've kept them near the top of my "Other Great Sites" section in honor of their early support, which played a big role in building the initial momentum that got us here, and for which I'll always be grateful.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Here in the States you can screen this on Tubi, which, at 90 minutes is a great deal. Jonathan Sothcott and Shogun Films are off to a great start with this one, and I can't wait to see what they do next with Renegades. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11618350

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

Strippers vs Werewolves (2012)

I've seen this one on Instant for some time, and it looks like it could be a lot of fun.  Plus it lists Robert Englund in the cast, which is another selling point.  On the other hand, I had similar expectations for Zombie Strippers!, and was somewhat disappointed with that one, so who knows.  That one also had Englund.  Am I sensing a theme here?

Strippers vs Werewolves is about a London strip joint where Justice, giving Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet a private dance, turns him on so much he turns into a werewolf and she stabs him in the eye with a silver fountain pen, killing him.  That's not a good thing, when his werewolf friends want revenge, and it'll only be a matter of time before they trace his death back to the club.  That leaves club owner, Sarah Douglas, with a choice (and no it's not to jump in a flying parallelogram and escape into space): fight or run.  She chooses to fight, resulting in the ultimate showdown between strippers and werewolves.



You ever heard that joke "how many people with ADD does it take to change a light bulb?  Let's ride a bike!"  That's how I felt watching this movie.  My God, it was all over the place, it never knew what it wanted to do.  Not to mention, it did this comic book editing/cinematographic device where the screen would be split into panels and make things even worse.  I don't remember that device working in Ang Lee's Hulk either.  The worst was how it would look like it wanted to develop something, and then just totally abandon it.  Whether it was Martin Compston's character torn between protecting Justice, his fiancee, or siding with his fellow werewolves, which runs through the film only to have him decide on his werewolves in a way that made it seem like he was never torn; or the strippers vs. zombie scorecard during the end battle, which is inexplicably abandoned after two minutes, and really never even kept score considering the strippers who were killed weren't actually killed.  I understand, a movie called Strippers vs Werewolves should be all over the place, but considering most of the jokes were of the "waka waka waka" notsomuch variety, and the gore mixed with the bad jokes felt off in terms of dark humor, the inconsistent story had me thinking "what am I doing here?"

Why is a movie like Strippers vs Werewolves so hard to make right then?  It sounds like it should make itself?  When I tell people about the Direct to Video Connoisseur, it's movies like this they think of, and movies like this they assume I'd love, and I assume it too.  I think it's that problem though, it feels like it should make itself, and then the film makers start going off the rails, whether it's a story that doesn't know where it wants to be, jokes that are just "hey-oh! Irony! waka waka waka!", or this Michael Bay split second take combined with comic book frames all over the screen style of editing.  Simpler is often better.  Maybe because I grew up on the coast of Maine, where simplicity is desired, where a lobster is simply boiled alive, cracked open, dipped in butter, and that's it, I have trouble with too much being done to jazz up something that should be so good on its own.  This story of Martin Compston and Adele Silva's Justice should be enough to carry the day if he throws in his lot with her to protect her, and in the late 80s early 90s, it would have been, and all of this craziness would've been dialed down.



Don't get me wrong, there were some great touches in this that worked really well.  The opening credits had "Hungry Like the Wolf" playing, which was really cool.  At the end, when the strippers confront the werewolves at the end, they dress as Little Red Riding Hood, which I liked and was really hot.  I liked the idea of the strippers fortifying their club for the showdown with the werewolves, but like a lot of the film, it felt like the build up was better than the payoff.  And the actors, which I will get into more in the next paragraph, all turned in great performances and seemed to be on board with what the film was all about, even if the film didn't seem to know.

All right, so let's start with Martin Compston, who we've seen before in The Disappearance of Alice Creed.  If you look at his imdb photo, he seems so happy to see you, doesn't he?  Man, he was perfect for the guy who doesn't feel comfortable being a werewolf, and wants to protect his girlfriend, but doesn't know if he wants to cross Billy Murry, the werewolf leader.  It's too bad we never got there with that.  Billy Murray we've also seen before in One in the Chamber, and he was perfect as the baddie.  Sarah Douglas was equally great as the strip club owner, but her death was pretty weird and muddled, something I was disappointed in.  Even worse was Alan Ford, Brick Top in Snatch, who was fantastic, and is rubbed out by the werewolves without a fight.  What a waste considering they somewhat developed his character.  Finally, of all the strippers, I really liked Barbara Nedeljakova's (the two Hostel movies) character, though I think if they'd gotten rid of her awkward vampire hunter boyfriend character and made her the expert on the occult, it would've been so much better; and Adele Silva as Justice was good too, but would've been better had her character along with Compston's not been at odds with each other.  Oh, and I almost forgot Martin Kemp and Robert Englund.  That's because they're barely in the film.



I'm writing this review as my Celtics start their first season since 1998 without my favorite player, Paul Pierce, and of all the places to see someone in a Celtics Pierce jersey, it's here in a campy horror film shot in England.  Yes, I'm also watching my Red Sox play in Game 6 of the World Series tonight too, and hopefully they'll win it, but still, I'm in for a long year with my C's, and seeing that jersey didn't help.  On the other hand, I guess it's cool that those jerseys are sold there.

Okay, enough of that, let's wrap this up.  It didn't work for me.  You might dig it though.  Too all over the place, too many things started but not finished, too hard to concentrate on anything.  As of this posting, you can get it on Instant.  Maybe check it out, at least you don't have to finish it if you don't like it like I did to write this review.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1702009/