Corporate Ladder (1997)

We're ending our Hall of Fame inductions month with the great Kathleen Kinmont, someone who probably should've been in a while ago when I started getting names like Shannon Tweed and Julie Strain in. She's got some great PM flicks to her name, plus other classics like Phoenix the Warrior, but as I was looking for the right post for her induction, I saw this was on DailyMotion and figured it would be worth a go. Turned out, it was one of those reversed image versions, but I would not be denied, and I was able to finally track it down.

The Corporate Ladder (or Eine tödliche Blondine in Germany, which if my 20-year-old rusty German is correct, translates to "the Deadly Blonde") has Kinmont as an ad assistant who may or may not have tossed her sexually harassing boss our of his office window to his death. Anyway, she shows up in LA to work with ad exec Matt Taylor (Tony Denison), who's good, but not that good, and is dealing with guff from co-worker Ben Cross. Anyway, when he has a shot at the originally-named denim brand Indigo Jeans, he's not doing great, but when he leaves the room Kinmont takes over and makes it all great. He wins the account, splits the $20,000 bonus with her, and then they go back to his office and have sex. I forgot to mention, he's married to Talisa Soto, who was between Mortal Kombat movies and looking for something to do. Anyway, you know the rest of how this Fatal Attraction thing goes.

This is one of those ones that takes a while to get where it's going, and I don't even know if it even gets there, but along the way you get some genre-specific moments that make it a fun time. The runtime hurts it the most, as we're clocking in at a buck-52, and these complicated stories have all kinds of threads that need weaving. It was directed and co-written by eventual Oscar winner Nick Vallelonga--who also has a great one-scene role--but with his name third on the list of writers, I wonder if Playboy, who was one of the production companies, got the script and had him turn it into a softcore erotic thriller version of Fatal Attraction. And to that point, this didn't have a lot of softcore stuff going on with it. For a movie closing in on two hours, if people should be getting after it every 10-15 minutes, we should've had like 8-12 scenes, and I think we maybe had 4. One bright spot was Kinmont, who really went for it. Some of the dialog where she was supposed to just be sinister didn't work, but when her character was losing it, she went all in, as did she with her two love scenes with Denison. The other interesting element of this was the Jan Hammer score. That's right, the Miami Vice guy, and it was every bit that, which was an odd juxtaposition with the 1997 setting. Again though, there were plenty of fun moments, I think if it clocked in at a 90 or even 100-minute runtime, I'd feel better about recommending it.

Kinmont gets into the Hall of Fame on her 10th movie, which puts her in a tie with Julie Strain for second-most by a woman on the DTVC, behind Cynthia Rothrock's 47. I don't know if it's correct to say she's come a long way on this site, or more that I have, because when I first started back in 2007, I referred to her as "the chick from Renegade," thinking I was edgy and funny, and while I don't know that I'll go back and Lucas those old reviews, I know now that she and any other actor deserved more respect than that. (Okay, maybe not the 300-pound Pork Roast, but everyone else then!) If you look at her bio, this was right after Renegade, and I wonder if there was a part of her that wanted to get outside of that and the other action movies she'd been doing. If that's the case, she definitely did that here, even if I prefer the action movies from her. She still has some stuff we can review, so while I think Rothrock's 47 movies isn't in jeopardy, we'll definitely see her again on the site. Here's to you Ms. Kinmont, you're one of the greats.

Among the other names in this, I think Ben Cross might be the biggest. This is now his sixth film on the site, so I figured it was time to finally tag him. He played as smarmy a heel as you'd want. I wonder if the Star Trek reboot saw him in this, and that's why they cast him as Sarek. We mentioned Nick Vallelonga before, our film's one Oscar winner. We've seen him before too, most notably in Paydirt, which we also covered on the pod with Francis Rizzo III from the KilmerCast pod, back on episode 93. From a directing standpoint, it looked like he was trying for a Hitchcockian feel, or like a classic Noir, which I can appreciate, and then probably leaned on his DP for the sex scenes. Again, his one scene in the film, where he's an old friend that talks to Denison, is fantastic. A couple other notable names, Talisa Soto, our first time seeing her on the site, but 1997 was between her two stints as Kitana in the Mortal Kombat movies. She didn't have a lot to do in this as Denison's stay-at-home wife, I would've loved to have seen her throw a bladed fan at Kinmont; and then Meilani Paul, who played the model of the jeans campaign, she was in the Dolph classic Agent Red. Rounding out the cast, we had a few familiar mainstays, Tony Denison as the lead, he does what you want; Jennifer O'Neill as her and Cross's boss, same, she's exactly what you want in that role; and finally, the late Jon Polito as the head of the company, you gotta love seeing him whenever you can.

One cinematic device the film uses well is the multiple mirrors to duplicate the character onscreen, while giving us this sense that the character's not recognizing themselves as they're about to do something untoward, or if they have a self-loathing that causes them act out like Kinmont's character in this scene. The device first struck me as a literary device in Anna Karenina, where Tolstoy has that moment where Anna is with her daughter, who shares her name, and then is surrounded by portraits of herself. I think in that case similar to the shot from this film the reflections of the character are judging their behavior, and we find out later that Kinmont's character has issues with how she feels she looks, which may be part of what's driving this. It was great stuff, and worked really well.

Finally, there's a moment in the film where Kinmont shows Denison that she had business cards made up for him saying he's the president of the company. The idea she said is for him to visualize that success. While it's the only actual mention of moving up the corporate ladder this has despite its name (Eine tödliche Blondine makes more sense actually based on how the movie played out), it does bring up this concept of visualization, and whether or not it works. Like you'll often hear how an athlete like Aaron Rodgers visualizes success on the field, but is that visualization or preparation? And how well does it work if he's only won one championship and usually flames out in the playoffs? In some cases "visualization" comes up against Mike Tyson's adage "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." Also, remember the old bumper sticker that said "visualize world peace," which led someone to create a counter that said "visualize whirled peas." When I think of 90s bumper stickers, the worst was "unless you're a hemorrhoid, get off my ass," which didn't make any sense, because who would want a hemorrhoid to stay on their ass? Anyway, I'm getting off track, here the film uses the concept of trite visualization as plot device, as the business card becomes an issue for Denison later in the story. Chekhov's trite visualization? 

And with that, let's wrap this up. I'm not sure where you can get this, unless you have a plug-in on your browser that reverses back a reversed video, then you can catch it on DailyMotion. It's long, and is more talk than action, but it has its fun moments. And here's to you again Kathleen Kinmont. You're one of the greats, and this induction is truly deserved.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115946

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/

Phoenix the Warrior aka She-Wolves of the Wasteland (1988)

It had been over four years since we last had a Kathleen Kinmont film on the site, so I figured it was time, and when I saw that this film was on Tubi, it sounded like a no-brainer. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Mitch at the Video Vacuum, and Down Among the Z Movies have all covered this, meaning it was probably long overdue for me to cover it too. 

Phoenix the Warrior is a post-apocalyptic AIP flick with Kathleen Kinmont as our eponymous hero. She rescues a young lady, Keela (Peggy McIntaggart), who just happens to be pregnant, and in this future where pretty much only women survived the apocalypse, a pregnant woman is a big deal. So big that Persis Khambatta and her ruler, the Reverend Mother (Sheila Howard) want her, because the baby Keela is carrying is a special boy that the Reverend Mother could use to power herself--or something. Whatever it is, Kinmont needs to protect Keela and her baby at all costs, otherwise the post-apocalyptic world will be destroyed--or something.

As post-apocalyptic exploitation goes, this isn't horrible. We have a tight 90-minute runtime, Kinmont is a great lead, Persis Khambatta kills it as the baddie, and we get all of the usual post-apocalyptic trappings, like buggies and dirt and fun 80s hairdos. You then have the added element of AIP, which gives this a unique quality the way Corman/Santiago ones are unique, or PM's entry Steel Frontier is unique. For example, I tagged Ted Prior because he gets a set constructor credit, but I think it was more that they reused his set from Mankillers, the corrugated iron shanty town looks like a rundown version of William Zipp's evil drug lord lair from that film. That's the kind of thing that will push a usual post-apocalyptic flick like this up a notch or two, and that can mean a lot when you've seen a lot of these--which I have, more than I expected when I started this site! If you're a connoisseur of these kinds of movies, this is worth a look.

We're now at 9 films for Kinmont, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it puts her in a three-way tie with Shannon Tweed and Dona Speir for third-most all-time among women on the site, behind Cynthia Rothrock's 43, and Julie Strain's 10. The other thing is she was alone as second-most all-time when we last reviewed one of her movies, so in that time Strain, Tweed, and Speir have caught her. I was looking at her bio, and there are some movies of hers we need to do, the problem is they aren't as easy to find, a lot of them haven't made it to free streamers yet--and funny enough, this one is on Tubi twice, as both this title and She-Wolves of the Wasteland. I'll work on tracking down more of her stuff from the late 80s/early 90s that fits our site more, because she should have more films reviewed here than she does. Here's to you Ms. Kinmont, you're one of the greats.

This movie was a staple of USA Up All Night in the 90s, which makes sense considering most of the film has women in bikinis or less. According to the IMDb trivia, Kinmont said the filmmakers asked her to go topless too, but she said no, because she thought the nudity was gratuitous, and they weren't paying her enough--the $50 a day she got barely covered the gas required to drive out the Mojave Desert for shooting. The other thing she said was this was a non-SAG role that she took because the filmmakers assured her the film would only be shown overseas, but when it ended up on HBO and USA, she almost lost her SAG card as a result, and she never saw a dime from that cable money. I guess David Winters and AIP really put the "exploit" in "exploitation," huh? And if Kinmont was only making $50 a day, we have to imagine Ted Prior got nothing for them using his corrugated iron shanty town that he went to all that trouble to make for Mankillers. When you put this up against her doing a love scene with Wings Hauser in Art of Dying that involved him pouring milk and food all over her and yelling at the make-up woman to powder his bare asscheeks, you realize that Wings and PM were probably nothing compared to her AIP experience--okay, maybe not "nothing," maybe just not as bad, right?

The 80s were rife with same-sex platonic partners raising kids, so the fact that this film used that device wasn't too out of the ordinary for the time. We had My Two Dads and Full House as examples of straight males living together and raising kids, and then we had Kate and Allie as two straight women doing the same thing. They were skirting the line of same-sex romantic partners raising kids, but never quite getting there, which meant when you had situations like my parents telling me my mom's best friend was living with her "roommate," and that that "roommate" was pregnant by artificial insemination, it was believable because we had Kate and Allie and Murphy Brown to look to as examples for why my aunt and her "roommate" weren't actually in the committed romantic relationship they actually were in. The thing is though, this movie could've gone there, but for some reason in a lot of exploitation films, homosexuality is depicted as this degenerate thing, like here when women hook up with other women, they're the baddies, while Kinmont's hero and the pregnant woman she rescued would never "engage in that kind of thing." Nope, they're Kate and Allie raising their Murphy Brown child in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, nothing else to see here--until a balding, mustachioed man falls into their laps, and then it's on.

Finally, look at that beautiful Zenith TV set. Not sure how its knobs lasted that long after the apocalypse, but considering everything else I'm accepting in this film, I probably shouldn't worry about it. I did some digging, aka "I looked Zenith up on Wikipedia," and I found out when this film was made, Zenith was already in trouble. The HDTV technology they were starting to pioneer was over a decade away from making it to market, and between their market share dipping due to Japanese competitors, and the cost of the anti-dumping lawsuit they were party to that was filed against those Japanese competitors--which Zenith and their co-plaintiffs eventually lost--they weren't pulling in the money they used to while the debts were mounting up. Over time the company that eventually became LG bought an increasing share in them, finally buying the whole thing in 1999, so LG owns what remains of Zenith now. The irony of course with those dials, was Zenith also pioneered the remote control, so for most of that TV's life the dials weren't necessary, unless a kid had it in the 80s and needed to turn the dial between channels to view some squiggly-lined porn, a practice that also became obsolete when TVs stopped using dials, and internet porn became so prolific. What a scene that would've been in this movie though if the people who prayed to the TVs were sitting around it, turning the dial between channels to watch squiggly-lined porn that was being produced in a post-apocalyptic corrugated-iron shanty town built by Ted Prior for another AIP film. You AIP guys really missed a trick there, didn't you?

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi, under both its names, though the film is the same. This is fun as a post-apocalyptic actioner between the cast and the AIP touches, and sometimes for a film like this that's all you need.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093731

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

Final Impact (1992)

I had always thought I'd reviewed this one before, but when I was putting together my Gary Daniels list on Letterboxd, I realized that that not only wasn't the case, but I hadn't even seen it. It was something I needed to rectify as soon as possible, which I'm doing now. In addition to me, this has also been covered by Comeuppance Reviews, Movies in the Attic, the Video Vacuum, and Fist of the B-List, so you can check out their sites to see what they all think. Also, if you haven't already, check us out on Letterbox. We have lists on movies we want to see, ones we have queued up to review, and lists like the Gary Daniels and Dolph Lundgren lists.

Final Impact is a PM Entertainment flick with Lamas as an old fighter who loses a big match and opens a strip club/fighting ring after. When the Ohio State Champ, Michael Worth, shows up and wants him to train him, Lamas thinks this kid has what it takes to beat Jake, the guy that took him down years ago.

This is what I'm talking about right here. Maybe it could have used more fighting, but beyond that it's just a fun PM Entertainment flick. Lamas is great in the lead, Worth does his part as the young upstart, and Kinmont holds the whole thing together. At the same time, there's plenty of stuff you can get a kick out of, like Lamas's fight with Jake at the Neon Graveyard in Las Vegas; or even the idea of the oil wrestling/strip club/karate club that Lamas runs, which, to be honest would actually be kind of a cool idea if it weren't for the state boxing commissions and the fact that people could die if they got a bad concussion in one of the fights. Now I'm meandering and it's only the third paragraph.

We haven't seen DTVC Hall of Famer Lorenzo Lamas since 2012, and I don't know about you, but I've missed him. I was going through some of the old posts, and at one time he was second to Dolph with the most. While he's still one of only 6 actors in the 30 Club, he's now only tied with Rothrock for the fifth most. I think for an indication of why, we can go back to the last film of his we'd done, Mexican Gold aka Return of the Outlaws. He's all over the cover and barely in the film. And we were finding that a lot. Couple that with the fact that there were movies like this out there of his that I'd thought I'd already done--The Swordsman and its sequel Gladiator Cop also come to mind--and you can see how he stalled while someone like his co-star in this, Gary Daniels, blew past him and into the 40 Club with Dolph. Recently I was on the Jacked Up Review Show podcast with Cam Sully, and I put Lamas 10th on my list of top DTV stars, behind Adkins at 9. It's possible I need to rethink that, that I may have been hasty in having Adkins jump him so soon.

Speaking of Gary Daniels, he only has a small role in this, but when you combine it with smaller fighter roles by another Hall of Famer, Art Camacho, and PM Mainstay Ian Jacklin, the three together work as a kind of PM fighter showcase that was really fun to see. While this is going to go down as a tag for Daniels and Camacho, like I did with Rothrock in the Saber Raine review, it won't count as a film for them, so I won't push any films they've done with bigger parts down my queue. I was going to say that in the past that kept me from doing more films with Daniels in the lead, because I didn't want to do too much Daniels all at once, but the truth is he has the second most tags after Dolph, and Camacho has the third most, so it doesn't really matter. As long as I can find the films, I can do the reviews.

As I mentioned above, Kathleen Kinmont's part was the emotional glue that held things together, especially with Worth and Lamas. Nowadays we applaud someone who can take a low-budget script shot on the quick and do more with it--look at Vivica A. Fox's success with David DeCoteau's "Wrong" movies. I think when we look back at Kinmont's PM career, we find she was just as professional and maybe even endured more--her lovemaking scene with Wings Hauser in Art of Dying comes to mind, and I can see Fox or another actress saying "that's not happening." Coming back to her PM Entertainment films after my hiatus, I think she's one of their unsung heroes, and hopefully as more of these films become available to the various streaming services out there, her contributions will be better recognized.

Finally, with this movie, PM will have 35 reviewed on here, putting them only a few away from Cannon as a movie house--Millennium has even more at 61, but I'm not sure where to put them. For PM to pass Cannon in tags would be a huge feat though. It may also mean I need to consider adding in Pepin and Merhi to the Hall of Fame, considering I already have Golan-Globus and Roger Corman in there. It's a testament to what PM meant to the DTV action world in the late 80s/early-to-mid 90s, and how a site like this wouldn't have been possible without them.

But the site is here, so it's time to wrap up. Right now this is on Tubi and Prime. It looks like a full-screen transfer, which isn't the worst thing in the world--you get to remember what it was like before widescreen TVs. If you want, I still have an old 13" TV kicking around if you really want to have the full experience.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104267

Night of the Warrior (1991)

This is one of the few Lorenzo Lamas joints from the late 80s early/90s that I hadn't already seen, so I was stoked to finally get a hold of it. It just sounds awesome, right? "Lorenzo Lamas in Night of the Warrior", I mean, how can you go wrong there, right? Ty at Comeuppance Reviews did this one a little while back too, if you want to see what he thought and compare with me.

Night of the Warrior has Lamas as a fighter, fighting for Luke of "Luke and Laura" fame, in order to pay off the mortgage to the exotic club he and his mom own (played by his real life mom Arlene Dahl). After the mortgage is paid off, he thinks he's done, so he goes off to win over art history major/waitress Kathleen Kinmont, who is turned on by his amateur photography/exploitation of the local homeless population that are his subjects. Anyway, Luke needs him to do one more fight, because a Korean mob boss will kill him if he doesn't, so Luke leans on him, using Lamas's mom and girlfriend for leverage.



Let's get one thing straight first, this is not an action film per se, but rather an attempt at a modern Film Noir piece. The problem is, writer Thomas Ian Griffith, though an English Lit major at Holy Cross, is no Dashiell Hammett, meaning Night of the Warrior has it's good moments and its bad, but overall doesn't quite work. The music and cinematography definitely had that Noir-ish vibe down; but then you had these attempts at action movie clichés, like the kidnapped girl; and then there were some of their Noir themes that they didn't follow through on, like Kathleen Kinmont's character, who started off very well rounded, and finished off very blah, or the introduction of Lamas being framed, which comes and goes rather quickly and effortlessly. It was like, it had too little action to be good for the action film fans, but didn't handle the Film Noir aspects well enough to be good for those fans either, so we were left with nothing. Oh, and I can't forget the bad Madonna video scene with Lamas and some other dude fighting while covered in mud at the beginning.

From the Lamas perspective, this looked pretty good at the beginning. No, he didn't do the Noir protagonist who is also a photographer as well as Michael Paré in Sunset Heat, but had the writing stayed true, based on the beginning, I think he would've still done well. But then there was this odd dramatic aspect, that wasn't written well, didn't look natural, and made Lamas look foolish. I don't know, at the beginning, when he's in the diner hitting on Kathleen Kinmont, there was a sense that he might pull this off. Who knows if, given the chance, he might have done it. As far as the action goes, he has a few good scenes, but also a couple weird ones, including a fight with his crippled friend. The less said about that the better.



Kathleen Kinmont got a bit of a raw deal in this one, because she started off strong in that Noir-ish female lead, then her character was almost written out of the film altogether, only to come back for the sole purpose of being kidnapped. It had never crossed my mind before that she'd make a great lead in a Film Noir picture, but it makes sense after seeing it, because she's smart-- which comes out on-screen when the role allows her to-- very pretty, and can wear the hell out of a short black dress. I had a feeling, though, that Thomas Ian Griffith, in writing her character, might have been over his head, because there's a scene early on where she and Lamas are in his apartment, and she tosses him a camera and tells him to take her picture. Then she asks him how to pose, and he says that's not how he works, so she starts trying to affect sexy poses for him. It was way too unnatural. The sexier thing would've been to have her not try to be sexy, but just be who her character is, and have him capture that and see her sexiness naturally. Anyway, it wasn't long after that before she was almost done completely, her character devolving into an action movie damsel in distress.

I'm not sure which is cooler, that Lamas's mom starred in this, or Luke of "Luke and Laura" fame from General Hospital. On the one hand, it's his mom, which is cool; but on the other, Lamas being a soap actor himself, to be paired with such a luminary as that is huge. The only thing cooler would've been if Rick Springfield did a movie with Lamas too. Favorite Rick Springfield song? I may have to go with "Don't Talk to Strangers", even though, like everyone else, I love "Jesse's Girl" too. Also of note, the late Bill Erwin-- who just died recently at the age of 96-- plays Kinmont's uncle. Great cameo from him.



I'm wrapping up with this seventh paragraph for all my horror readers out there. That's right, Ken Foree, from one of my all time favorite horror films, Dawn of the Dead, stars in this as Luke's hatchet man. This is actually the second Foree film we've done, the first being Dolph Lundgren's Army of One (which I should note is my most popular Dolph film on here by views, by virtue of the fact that people searching for nude pics of Kristen Alfonso are directed there. No joke). One of the best lines from a horror film ever is in Dawn of the Dead, near the beginning, when Foree and Francine are in the helicopter about to escape, and he tells her "I lost a lot of brothers." "Real brothers, or soul brothers?" "Both."

This is a bad deal. Don't be fooled by the title or the cover, there's very little action, and the Film Noir material isn't handled well either. The payoff just isn't there to warrant a recommendation. As far as availability, you can buy it new on DVD, but for some reason or other, Netflix doesn't offer it, so for the price asked, it's not worth it anyway.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102535/

Final Round (1994)

I wish I could remember exactly when I first saw this. It's like asking me if I can remember when I first saw The Running Man. Okay, no it isn't, but I'm just sayin'.... Anyway, it took me a little bit to track it down on VHS... okay, no I didn't track it down, I came across it and figured why the hell not, but I'm just sayin'... why don't I just get to the review?

Final Round stars DTVC Hall of Famer Lorenzo Lamas as Tyler Verdiccio, a motorcycle mechanic who can also fight. Kathleen Kinmont sees him at a gym beating a guy who once starred as a bad immortal on Highlander: The Series, and she decides he's good fresh meat for this Running Man rip-off game run by another Highlander: The Series villain (two-time in fact) Anthony De Longis. Thing is, De Longis is mad at Kinmont, so after he captures Lamas, he throws her in the game too, along with one of the guys from Homicide Life on the Street. Now Lamas needs to become the hunter, or some such shit.



imdb, in their "Movie Connections" section for this film, listed The Running Man as one of the connections, and gave this as the reason "This movie directly lifts the concept of The Running Man". This is no where as good as The Running Man, of course, even down to the Homicide Life on the Street actor they used-- what, Yaphet Kotto wasn't available, or didn't want to walk within ten feet of this? Forget the rip-off factor, because I'm usually up for a good rip-off when done well, but this was just a big old pile of suck. There's one scene where one of the hunters turns out the lights on Lamas and co., and uses night vision goggles to see them. She spends an inordinate amount of time cutting them with a knife, toying with them, and we're wondering how Lamas will get out of this one. Well, Kinmont simply turns on the lights, and they kill her (the hunter, not Kinmont). It was a metaphor for the whole film: scenes that went on too long, that were more annoying than suspenseful, and didn't take any ingenuity from our hero to solve them. This is hard to watch, and not a lot of fun, even to make fun of.

I must say, I was rather disappointed by this turn of events, because the film started off well-- even if in only a funny way-- and a big part of that was Lamas. The hair, the boxing gloves, and then after the working on the bike with no shirt on, and then the overalls with one unsnapped he wears to meet Kinmont for their date at the bar. It's just classy Lamas all the way around. The problem was, the film artificially diminished his character because they thought it would make him more intriguing or something. Instead, it only helped to further diminish the film. I mean, the only thing this film had going for it was Lamas as the hero and De Longis as the baddie. Make Lamas totally awesome, totally kick ass. Right away, when the Dan Dierdorf look-alike bodyguard leads Lamas into the playing field at shotgun-point, Lamas, instead of meekly doing what he's told, should whip around, disarm him, and in the next scene we see the hunters coming across his dead body with a note attached about how he (Lamas) has a gun now. But I guess being awesome is a little too much to ask of a movie like this.



This scene here with the laser sight reminds me of a similar one in the Dolph Lundgren classic Hidden Assassin, not to be confused with another Dolph classic, Hidden Agenda. If you're wondering, the laser sight in Final Round is attached to a crossbow, which is shot by Ian Jacklin. Does it get any more jack-ass-y than that? I should probably be saying jackbutt, right, since I don't have the adult warning gate to enter my blog. Oh, I guess I said "shit" two paragraphs ago, which either means I need to fix that, or I can say jackass. What if I just want to say jackbutt, just to say it? Like, Ian Jacklin with his mullet and the camera on his face that looked like an eye patch and his tiny crossbow with a laser sight looked like a total jackbutt. That this movie looks like it was made by a bunch of jackbutts. Frickin' jackbutts.

Jackasses, okay, they were jackasses. Kathleen Kinmont and Lorenzo Lamas had one of the most awkward love scenes, which is saying a lot, because DTV movies seem to be a haven for awkward love scenes. We had Kinmont, in her underwear and nylons, and she peels one of her nylons down seductively-- only to run into her shoe, which was a mess of buckles and ties and whatnot. So she just rolled it down that far and left it, which looked so weird. Then she saunters over to Lamas, who takes her other leg, and proceeds to do the same thing, down to the shoe, and leaves it there. How hard would it have been to make that less awkward? I guess if you're a jackass, too hard.



Look at that shot up there. It looks like it's from an indie art house flick about a small Midwestern town in the 50s. How does something so awesome emerge from a film so ah-trocious? I mean, you'd never know that, instead of James McAvoy coming out of his garage to meet Kira Knightly or something, we have a shirtless Lorenzo Lamas coming to meet Kathleen Kinmont so the two can have a sexual innuendo conversation about bikes.

What do you want me to say? Yes, rent The Running Man on DVD, or if you own it-- of course, you don't need me to tell you The Running Man was awesome, what you need me to tell you is this rip-off of The Running Man was no good, and I'll be happy to oblige you. Pile o' suck.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106907/

Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster (1989)

I've been meaning to get after this one for a while. In part it's the Lorenzo Lamas factor, but more than that, this has been said by many to be Lamas' best film, including Mr. Kenner at Movies in the Attic (that link is to his review of this film). As a huge Lamas guy, I needed to know how true this is, but the fact it wasn't available on DVD, and hard to find on VHS, meant it was put on hold. But I kept my ear to the ground, and managed to get all three Lamas Snake Eater films in one fell swoop.

Snake Eater II has Lamas as Soldier, a crazy cop who comes up with all manner of violent contraptions to trap and kill bad guys. After a bloody rampage in a drug house that sold coke laced with rat poison, Lamas is sent to a mental hospital. While there, his friend Speed Boat on the outside keeps him in the loop about who's next on the drug dealer food chain, so Lamas can eventually get to the top and exact his revenge.



Before we discuss whether or not this is Lamas' best ever, let's look at it on its own merits. Solid action: check. Does the plot adversely affect the action? Not at all. Does the hero kick ass? That could've been better. Snake Eater II took the idea of The Punisher, then made the main character more of a twisted MacGyver. The problem was, there were too many silly digressions in the mental asylum. I don't even know why he was put in there, considering he could break out whenever he wanted. Why not just put him on suspension, make him go to the hot psychiatrist in order to be reinstated, and continue having him do the killings of bad guys he did on the sly. It just would've worked better. Overall though, not a bad deal.

I went through the archives, and based on my overall recommendations, this might be Lamas' best in my opinion as well. That might not necessarily be a good thing, because this is his 21st film we've reviewed, and I haven't given that many thumbs up. In fact, he might have the lowest total average of any Hall of Famer. In the end, I got The Rage and Bounty Tracker slightly ahead of this, and Bad Blood aka Viper slightly behind it, but I'm not married to any of those rankings. The truth is, unlike Dolph, Seagal, or even Daniels, I look for Lamas films to be silly. I mean, I look for the films of those actors to be silly too, but I also want them to be awesome. If I see Lamas disguised like Jeff Foxworthy, like he was in Mask of Death, I feel like it was a good film. So this may be Lamas' best film ever, and though that's not really saying much, that's okay too. He's not a Hall of Famer because he's awesome, he's a Hall of Famer because he's silly, and I'm fine with that.



I always love the hot psychiatrist in the bad action film. The hair up and glasses, the white lab coat open, revealing a tight sweater and short skirt. As the film goes on, her clothing and demeanor become sexier and sexier. For Snake Eater II, we had the lovely Michele Scarabelli, who just celebrated her 55th birthday on April 11th. You may remember her from Air Wolf. She never actually has any love scenes with Lamas on screen, and I wonder if that had to do with Kathleen Kinmont, who was also in the film in a very small part. Their relationship was pretty new when this film was made.

Speaking of Kinmont, this is her fifth film reviewed, tying her with Jillian McWhirter for the most by a non-Hall of Fame actress (Cynthia Rothrock's 10 is the most overall). It seems like this should be surprising, or demonstrate that I need to work to get more women tagged on here, but that isn't really the case. The 1980s and 90s bad action industry often employed unknowns to play the hottie opposite the star. Either that, or they'd take a woman from another medium, like Soap Operas, and that would be her only DTV action role ever. The Kinmonts and McWhirters are the exceptions, not the rules. Shannon Tweed and Angie Everhart are two examples of women who do a lot of DTV sexy thrillers, but not so many action, sci-fi, or horror films, and readers just don't come here for sexy thrillers (at least as far as I know they don't), so they may have a large DTV oeuvre, but their films don't make it up here that much. (If anyone's wondering, I do have a few from each in my Netflix queue, top of the list Executive Target with Everhart.)



Finally, a quick shout out to Ron Pallilo, who reprised his role from the first film as Torchy. He just turned 61 on April 2, one day after I turned 31. He's only had 10 credits since Snake Eater II, but it's one he had before that that caught my eye. In 1983 he did a DTV version of The Tempest-- yes, that The Tempest, the one written by Shakespeare. He played Trinculo, the Jester. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. was the only other name I recognized, and he played Prospero. I haven't read The Tempest in years, and when I picked up my big collected works of Shakespeare book, the thing was all dusty and falling apart. I bought it for $5 on sale at Barnes and Noble, so I guess I can't complain too much. If you're wondering, best Shakespeare quote ever: "What, is my beaver easier than it was?", from King Richard III.

It may sound like through my review that I'm disagreeing with Kenner, but he only gave it three stars, and I'd say my review is right in line with that. Maybe it's a commentary on Lorenzo Lamas that his best film is only a three-star rating, I don't know. I definitely recommend this, though. It's hard to find, but if you see it for a couple bucks on VHS, go for it. What would be nicer is if all three were to be released on DVD in one package for $10-$15, but I don't ever see that happening. Anyway, better than part one, and we'll see in a couple weeks if it's better than part three as well.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102950/

CIA II: Target Alexa (1994)

I was hesitant to watch this considering it didn't have OJ Simpson like the first one did. Who am I kidding, the film's directed by Lorenzo Lamas, and Kathleen Kinmont co-wrote the script. OJ or no OJ, this shit is right up my alley. No hesitation.

CIA II: Target Alexa picks up where part one left off. Lamas has rejoined the CIA, and Kinmont is hiding out in some small town with her daughter tending to a ranch. One of her old flames has part of a nuclear launch device, and the CIA wants it back. Luckily, in a completely fantastic situation, Kinmont is arrested, and the CIA can use this as leverage to reacquire her services. She infiltrates her old flame's hideout, and almost gets what she wants, before the bad guys with the other part of the nuclear bomb device swoop into the base and take both the part and Kinmont. Now Lamas must team up with the old flame to get her back.



I hate using this term, but it's the only way to describe the film: it was what it was. We all go in with preconceived notions about what a Lorenzo Lamas directed film of a Kathleen Kinmont co-written script will be, and CIA II met all of those expectations. The acting was silly, the dialog was stilted and unnatural, and there were parts of the plot that were so unrealistic that it made me want to reach into the TV and set everyone straight, as if I was watching Who's on First? And, as you can imagine, I totally dug this. This exudes "so bad it's good".

Lamas hits it out of the park as both director, and actor reprising the role of the awesomely named Agent Graver. As a MSTie, one of my favorite scenes came when Lamas was staking out the baddies' camp while Kinmont was in undercover. He has to make a sudden escape, and in so doing, employs a hang glider. Just like in Ator, this hang glider comes out of no where. It's slightly more believable, because it was factory manufactured, so it wasn't like he had to kill a deer and tan the hides and whatever. Just the same, where he would've kept this hang glider, and when he would've had the time to put it together if he was keeping it in a bag or something, is beyond me. Also, there's a sweet shot of him flying the hang glider in front of a green screen, and it's so reminiscent of Ator, I can't imagine this was anything other than an intentional joke. If so, it'd be all the more sweet.



The film does a horrible job putting Kinmont in jail. She goes to the local convenience store with her daughter to get some stuff, and these guys in clown masks with shotguns kill the clerk and try to rob the place, before she takes them out lethally to protect her child. The local fuzz blames her for the killing and sends her to jail. Really? You wanna go with that? Local cops dumb enough to not believe her side of the story that guys with clown masks and guns were threatening her daughter when the dead guys with clown masks and guns were lying right there. Then her attorney, played by Magnum PI's Larry Manetti, tells her to plea. Again, you wanna go with that one? Any defense attorney would be salivating at a chance to cut a case like that apart, if, and this is a big if, a local DA was dumb enough to try it. Come on guys, would it've taken that much more to do a real frame up job? She chases down a killer, ends up with the knife, and the cops find her with it and the victim's blood all over her. I loved the silliness of it, but sometimes I wish the people who made these films would sit and think for two seconds about what they're doing.

In order to complete the Renegade cast, Branscombe Richmond has a cameo as a Latin American dictator. I can't lie, I thought that was cool, but where was Lt. Dutch Dixon? Lamas never seems to use him in anything. Maybe Steven J. Cannell, the guy who plays him, is always busy. I just saw so many characters in this movie that Dutch could've played. According to imdb, they've never done anything together other than Renegade. Even worse, this is the only movie Richmond and Lamas have done, with the only credit other than Renegade and this being an episode of Falcon Crest. It seemed so natural in the film, but really it's an anomaly.



It's Kinmont he's worked with a lot outside of Renegade, with the two of them having 6 films together. Of course, none of these films were released after 1994, which probably isn't a coincidence considering they divorced in 1993, even though imdb says they remained friendly after the estrangement. This is her fourth film on the DTVC. I don't think she'll ever make the Hall of Fame, but based on her filmography, this'll be far from her last film on here.

If you get a kick out of Lorenzo Lamas, and like really bad movies, you can't go wrong here. If you need your bad movie to have a modicum of good movie in it, this might be a bit much. This is the kind of film that separates the occasional bad movie people from the hardcore sadists. I'm firmly planted in the latter category.

Fore more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109360/

CIA Code Name: Alexa (1992)

It's always weird to see a movie post 1994 that has OJ Simpson in it. At least it is to me. I know you can't Lucas him out of the films, and I wouldn't want anyone to, but when I turn on USA and see Naked Gun 33 and a 1/3 with OJ goofing around, it reminds me of a time when he was considered a really great guy in the American public. Watching this film, for instance, I have to take my mind back there in order to understand what the film makers were doing when they cast him.

CIA Code Name: Alexa is the first of two films that puts DTVC Hall of Famer Lorenzo Lamas in the lead role of CIA agent Mark Graver. Here he needs to use the lethal eponymous Alexa, played by Kathleen Kinmont, after local police officer OJ Simpson catches her carrying out a mission for her bad guy boss Victor Mahler (played by Alex Cord). In an homage to Hitchcock's Notorious, Lamas wants Kinmont to use Mahler's feelings for her to get her into his lair and get whatever it is he has that's a threat to national security. OJ wants in on the investigation, because his cop partner was killed by some of her ex-crime partners. Things don't go exactly as planned, and it's up to Lamas and The Juice to improvise if they wanna take the bad guys down.



This was a pretty silly film, made sillier by the fact OJ's in it. It came out right around the trial, and it was big on cable at the time. The lack of anything resembling a budget puts the film in a weird context: it's hard to get past how cheap the CIA is and how little resources they have. Then you throw in that Lamas isn't all together that convincing as a top notch CIA agent, and the whole thing takes on an air of a bunch of grown up kids playing dress up. This is MST3K level stuff.

Lamas looks like he's playing a drug dealer from Miami Vice more than a CIA agent with his slick-backed ponytail and five o'clock shadow. I give him an A for effort, though. I'd say imagine a Renegade episode where the regular writers went on vacation, and Reno was in an alternate universe where he was in the CIA, and Cheyenne played a deadly assassin. Bobby Sixkiller I guess would've been replaced by OJ. If you watched Renegade because you thought it was funny, you'd dig Lamas in this. If you watched Renegade because you thought it was a solid TV show... well, then I'm sorry...



OJ's in this a fair amount. He's supposed to be a "maverick" cop, but really he's a nice guy who does crazy things for no reason just so he can live up to his "maverick" moniker. The first time we see him he's at a stakeout with his partner, and he's hurting after a long night of drinking. He mixes Alka Seltzer in with his coffee in a move that's second only to Seizmore's use of beer on his cereal in Point Break in terms of depraved food pairings. With OJ being in the news again after he held some people at gun point, these movies are even weirder to me now. Hearing him on a tape yelling "Where's my shit!" and some scared guy replying "Mike took it.", it's hard to marry the new Juice with the beloved pre-1994 one. I guess he was always the bad OJ, though.

The bad guy, Mahler, doesn't make any sense. He's supposed to be really smart, like some kind of criminal mastermind, but he does ridiculously dumb things. His brother botches a mission, and to punish him, he cuts out one of his eyes. Then he sends him out on another mission so he can redeem himself. Now I've never run an international crime syndicate before, but I have to imagine the last thing I'd want is a man I'm sending out on delicate, extremely dangerous missions-- ones requiring experts to make sure everything's carried out perfectly-- to be sans one eye. Not only that, but I'd definitely not willfully cripple any of my henchmen. But I guess I'm not running an international crime syndicate.



A dude named Michael Baily Smith plays the bad guy's top henchman. He was also Fred Williamson's top henchman in Whatever It Takes. You may remember him as Super Freddy in the fifth Nightmare on Elm Street, which marked the only time anyone other than Robert Englund played the classic horror mainstay. It also says that in 1994, right after this came out, he was in a bad Fantastic Four movie. I've never seen this thing before, and netflix and Amazon didn't have it. According to Amazon it's not out on DVD yet. It's definitely something I need to see, though.

This is the third Kathleen Kinmont film I've reviewed on here, the other two being Gangland and the Wings Hauser classic Art of Dying, where she had the nasty sex with food scene with the DTVC Hall of Famer. In the latter, as with Renegade (more so with Renegade), Kinmont's more off-beat than she is dead serious, which is how we find her in this film and Gangland. The off-beat plays much better from her. Maybe its because I first saw her in Renegade, but when she plays dead serious, it just seems forced, and when dead serious seems forced, it comes off silly and overbearing. As far as I can tell her best work was in Renegade, and I'm still waiting for her to shake me of that conception.

This is a solid rental for a bad movie night. It's silly enough on it's own that you won't need to be that good at mocking a bad film to enjoy this one, and the OJ factor gives it a wrinkle that other films of it's ilk that you might see at the video store won't have. This one's so dumb, it's can't disappoint.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103907/

Gangland (2000)

I first saw this film on Encore Action. On my program guide it listed Sasha Mitchell and Costas Mandylor as its featured actors, which was enough for me. Upon watching it, I saw that it also has Coolio and Ice-T for about ten minutes at the very beginning, and the chick who plays Painkiller Jane for a few seconds somewhere in the middle. Now, seeing it again on DVD, I find out that it's selling itself, not on Sasha Mitchell and Costas Mandylor, the film's stars along with the chick from Renegade; but it's listing the three people who're in it for a total fifteen minutes of screen time. If I didn't like the idea of a Sasha Mitchell Costas Mandylor feature so much, I'd take the people who market this to small claims court for false advertising.

Gangland takes place three years from now in a post-apocalyptic future where a US dealing with nuclear fallout is also dealing with a flesh eating plague. Vincent Klyn (Warchild from Point Break) has a huge gang of dudes in leather jackets and pants that are threatening to take over what's left of the country. Tim Thomerson has developed a cure for the plague and plans to take it to the only safe zone in the country, Phoenix. Klyn catches him in an attempt to control the cure. While all this is happening, Costsas Mandylor meets Sasha Mitchell in jail (Klyn's reappropriated a local prison for his own ends.) They escape, bump into the chick from Renegade, and take down Klyn-doggy. All in a day's work.



This movie would be sweet bad action accept for one thing that really irks me: constant fade-outs. I hate constant fade-outs. It's like they're always going to commercial or something. I know these aren't the best film makers in the world, but do they have to make it so obvious? I've seen better film making on YouTube. Doesn't it seem annoying to them too when they're editing? Maybe it's just me...

Sasha Mitchell's the bomb in this. His martial arts technique is almost identical to Guile from Street Fighter II. It was so cool watching him go to work on bad guys, I almost forgot he couldn't act. It's too bad he doesn't do more work, because, at least to me, it's evident in a movie like this that he can hold his own. Of course, it was hilarious when he was yelling in anger about his brother's killing. I think someone should make a movie where he plays Cody from Step By Step and kicks people's asses. Now that's a hit.

Kathleen Kinmont's in this as well. I have a bad habit of calling her the chick from Renegade, and considering this is the second, and probably not the last film I've reviewed that has her in it, I should probably start using her name. I didn't like her in this, because she was trying too hard to do dark and brooding. I know her sister, played by Painkiller Jane, was killed off, but as an actor she didn't do the part well. She's better doing the off-beat kind of stuff she did on Renegade. Leave the brooding to Costas Mandylor.



I'm a huge Vincent Klyn guy. It's not like Man Crush level, but pretty close. No one else could pull off playing a character named Warchild in a movie like Point Break, and make it work. I think that's something pretty cool to hang your hat on. He's also a mainstay in newly inducted DTVC Hall of Famer Albert Pyun's films-- you may remember him especially in Cyborg. In this film, as in those other two, he does a great job playing an awesome baddie that we still don't want to root for. That's all we want in a bad guy, right?

Beyond the overuse of the fade-out technique, my other major issue was Klyn's second in command. He was some geeky ponytail guy who also was the film's writer and stuff. He didn't look like a kick ass bad guy, he looked like some creepy guy who might hit me with his sack of 8-sided dice to keep me and my friends from giving him a wedgie. He annoyed the piss out of me, and I was kind of disappointed that Costas Mandylor finally dispatched him by setting him on fire. He should've beat him to death with a keyboard in the middle of a LAN party or something. Who thought this guy worked on camera?



The two best parts about this were the bad one-liners and the fact that everyone from Costas Mandylor down to Tim Thomerson the scientist could fight. Best one-liner: Klyn asks Mandylor if he thought it would be that easy to kill him, and Mandylor says "We had to give it the ol' college try." Yes! Best fight came when Tim Thomerson, with no prior mention of him having any fighting skills, takes out some baddies in hand-to-hand combat. It wasn't just like hit someone over the head with a vase when he's not looking, he was blocking punches and delivering expert blows to the gut. It was like just by virtue of being in the movie anyone could fight. I loved it.

Before I recommend this film, I must warn everyone that I'm not kidding about how little Coolio, Ice-T, and Painkiller Jane are in this film. The box may make it sound like they're the main characters, but it's the old fashioned Direct to Video bait and switch. On the other hand, for myself, being the Direct to Video Connoisseur, Sasha Mitchell, Vincent Klyn, and Costas Mandylor are plenty good to make the film worth while. If that sounds like a good time to you too, pick this bad boy up. Just don't pay too much for it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265198/

The Art of Dying (1991)

I first got at look at this film after a friend bought it on eBay. Her job gave her and her coworkers some cash to buy things to up their seller rating, and I suggested some Wings Hauser movies. I was stoked when she came back with this one.

Art of Dying has Wings Hauser as a police detective (isn't he always?) tracking a serial killer, who looks like a poor man's Craig T. Nelson, that reenacts famous death scenes from movies: only this time it's real! Also, Bobby Sixkiller's sister in Renegade plays some nympho that randomly shows up a Wings' house and does him. At some point the killer catches the chick from Renegade, and Hauser has to finish him off.



As far as Wings goes, this may have been one of his best. It is ten kinds of hilarious. There's one scene where he's doing the Renegade chick, and pouring milk and other food on her, and you can see this gross puddle forming on the floor. You can also see Wings' butt cheeks, which I'm not sure how that grabs you, but my friends and I thought it was pretty funny. My personal fave was later in the film when Wings was trying to figure out why the Renegade chick kept randomly showing up and having sex with him. At one point she asks if it's better than marriage, and he says "oh, better than marriage" in this great Wings voice. Then he says that if women were going to be so independent in the 90s, he was gonna go gay. Knowing he wrote the script makes the dialog that much better.

The action is too sweet as well. Right off, Wings and his partner, a low rent Marsha Warfield, are called in to break up a domestic dispute, and the wife stabs Wings' partner, so he throws the woman through a window. It just felt great. I think I had a stitch I was laughing so hard.

Wings ends the movie with the weirdest plot twist ever: the Renegade chick is a cop. I have no idea why, I'm not sure how it's supposed to affect us, why she didn't say something sooner, why she was doing Wings in the first place-- but hey, it's better than marriage. While watching the movie, I wondered why the plot twist didn't feel contrived and unnatural in the plot to Wings, and then I reminded myself I was watching a Wings Hauser Pictures Original, and took a deep breath and relaxed.



This film has veteran character actor Michael J. Pollard in it. In case you're not sure off the top of your head who he is, he's that guy. When you look him up on imdb (or in the picture above), you'll realize he's that guy. In the movie, he plays the only person with his shit together, and for some reason, no one believes him. He cracks the case like in the first ten minutes. The idea of Wings writing a script where he plays the hero, yet a hero who's too dumb to figure out who the killer is before a veteran That Guy, just makes this film that much greater in my mind.

If there's one drawback to this film, it's the fact that it, like many other of DTVC Hall of Famer Wings Hauser's movies, it's not meant for rookie bad movie watchers. You really need a refined bad movie pallet to pull this off. On the other hand, when you have the bad movie viewing level of expertise to be able to appreciate a film of this low quality, I can't see how you won't thoroughly enjoy yourself.

If you're a bad movie veteran and you see this cheap on eBay or at your local video store, give it a shot. I know I had my share of laughs. This may be Wings' best, and of his bad movies that I've seen, this is right up there with Mind, Body, and Soul. I'd even go so far as to say if you're a rookie, and you've only got a few good baddies under your belt, maybe give this a shot too to see where you're at. You may surprise yourself with how much horribleness in one film you can actually take.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101369/