Black Creek (2024)

This is one that's been in production for some time, a labor of love for DTVC Hall of Famer and 40 Club member Cynthia Rothrock, we've seen myriad DTV stars attached to it who have dropped out, news of premiers and complementary media like a graphic novel, and finally a pre-order date ahead of it's recent release. Now that it's here and available, let's see how it did. In addition to us, Jon at the After Movie Diner and Chris DePetrillo at Bulletproof Action have covered this as well.

Black Creek starts with a sheriff (Patrick Kilpatrick) who gets bumped off by an evil landowner (Richard Norton). When the sheriff's sister (Rothrock) shows up and finds out her brother's been killed, she vows revenge. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but Norton's got a lot of men working for him, who in turn work Rothrock over and leave her for dead in the desert. Luckily, bumbling local drinker Roy (R. Marcus Taylor) finds her and brings her to a local medicine practitioner (Don "The Dragon" Wilson), who heals her in a wonderfully psychedelic sequence. With that out of the way and everyone sufficiently healed, it's time for our hero to get after it and get her revenge. Will she make it happen?

This is a fun deal. It's done on a budget, so there's plenty to pick at on that score if one were so inclined, but if it was between not having this because there wasn't the budget to make it look as clean as possible, or having what we got, I prefer the latter. My two qualms were the length, which at almost two hours was a bit long for me; and I think the script could've used some trimming--a lot of instances where someone says something, and someone asks why that is, and then the first person explains further, when we could've just had the further explanation without the back and forth. Those qualms are overshadowed by all the stuff that worked here though, like Rothrock as one of her best heroes since China O'Brien, Richard Norton as a chilling baddie in one of his final performances, and then guys like Wilson, Kilpatrick, and Keith Cooke giving us the fun performances we want from them when we see their names on the tin. It doesn't skimp on the action either, especially with Mike Möller as action director/fight choreographer. Again, budgetary constraints meant they couldn't do the quick edits we're used to in modern action, so instead we got sped up film that may not have looked as nice, but as a fan of everyone's work here, I was okay with it. This is a really great time that's worth supporting if you're a fan of Rothrock and everyone else involved.

I didn't mean to do Rothrock films on back-to-back weeks (and technically this is her third film in two months, with Darkness of Man back in May), but I felt like I needed to get this one reviewed sooner rather than later, if only to get the word out and support it. The reality for me as I was watching it was we needed a series of Westerns with Rothrock in the lead back in the 90s, and this should've been the callback to those movies thirty years later, but unfortunately we never got them in the 90s, so this has to be the movie that makes up for the movies that never were, if any of that makes sense. On the PM Podcast episode on Guardian Angel (which yours truly was also a guest, but not part of the Rothrock interview), she told Jon that she'd always wanted to do a Western and be the lead, and it shows, because she's a natural at it. Her Rose Jennings character in this is right up there with China O'Brien for me as her best character, even better than Kris Fairfield in the Rage and Honor films, and McKay in Guardian Angel. She also said on the PM Podcast interview that she plans to do a sequel, so hopefully that will happen. I think it's up to us to support this kind of thing though if we want to see it happen.

As I mentioned above, Richard Norton is fantastic in this. It unfortunately ended up being one of his final roles, but if it had to be, I think it's a nice thing that it was in this, making it as good as it could possibly be by his performance. In my Not Another Mistake post, I talked about how he knew exactly what a movie needed from him and he knew exactly how to deliver it, and that's so true here. Patrick Kilpatrick also would've made a great baddie, but I like the twist of him being one of the good guys; and then we have Norton giving us this fantastic villain who is sufficiently evil, but never takes away from Rothrock as the hero. We're going to miss him, but at least we have this performance here as a reminder of how great he was--as if we needed it.

Our third Hall of Famer and second 40 Club member in this is the great Don "The Dragon" Wilson, who plays Xiyang, part-Chinese part-Apache medicine and martial arts practitioner. I wish they would've done more with the Apache side if they felt it was that necessary to include that as part of his heritage, like maybe some advanced knife fighting through a sequence where he takes out three or four of Norton's baddies. That aside, Wilson is as all in as Norton was, which is nice considering, like Rothrock, we've been getting a lot of smaller roles from him lately. And after this, we have Taken from Rio Bravo, where he has almost as big a part as this, but beyond that, I think the rest we have of his to do are all small roles. In that sense, when we get a Dragon role and performance like this, we need to take it and run.

Finally, I want to touch on the length of this movie, because, as you know, I'm a stickler for runtimes. Recently in a writer's group I'm in, the topic came up that, if we want our books to sell, we need short chapters. For me, I don't think about my novels that way. If short chapters fit, I'll use them, like in my first novel Chad in Accounting, or my short action novel Bainbridge; if not, you get something like Don's House in the Mountains, which is five chapters over 275 pages. With that in mind, if Rothrock felt like she needed her movie to be almost two hours to tell the story she wanted to tell, then more power to her. If the mindset is similar to mine, where she didn't want to compromise on the story that was important to her just to get things in under 90 minutes, I can appreciate it.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently this is available as rent VOD and purchase on most major streaming sites that offer that kind of thing. I personally got it on Fandango at Home through a promo code I had. This is a great opportunity to support indie filmmakers, and hopefully the more we're able to support these efforts, the more movies they'll be able to make.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27078378

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

Picasso Trigger (1988)

In our continuing goal of getting all of the Sidaris LETHAL Ladies films on the site, we come to this film here, the fourth one we've covered so far. With 12 total in the series, I guess we can say we're a third of the way there, so we're not quite like Tommy and Gina living on a prayer. In addition to us, our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has covered this--and he was on our podcast episode about Dallas Connection where we discussed all the Sidaris films--and Bulletproof Action--though not Todd Gaines, who's renown for being big on all of these movies.

Picasso Trigger has John Aprea as a crime boss of the same code name who is killed by fellow crime boss Rodrigo Obregon. From there, Obregon tries to kill off all the agents that put his brother in jail, which means the Agency needs to call their best agents into action to take him and his cronies down. Leading the crew is a new Abilene, Travis (Steve Bond), who still can't shoot straight, but is doing well with the ladies, moving between Dona Speir, and the mysterious agent Pantera (Roberta Vasquez), whom he dated in college. Will Abilene and his crew be able to take all these baddies down?

This, like the others in the LETHAL Ladies series, is a lot of fun. I think this takes what was established in Hard Ticket to Hawaii and turns it up even more. We have all the guns, explosions, remote control toys, dirt bikes, jet skies, and Ferraris you'd want, plus all the boobs and buttocks. There are also a lot of names in this, from the classics we all know and love like Speir, Obregon, Hope Marie Carlton, Cynthia Brimhall and Harold Diamond, but we also get DTVC favorite Keith Cooke, Bruce Penhall in his first appearance in the series, and Dennis Alexio, one short year before he was killed in Kickboxer so Van Damme could go to Thailand and have a great drunk dancing scene. On the other hand, this might not be as much of a classic as some of the others--like Hard Ticket to Hawaii--so if you're introducing people to the series, or you're getting into them yourself, you might want to try one of those others first, and come to this one after. Still worth your viewing though.

By the time we get to this third film, you could sense that the Abilene who can't shoot straight may have lost its luster a bit. I think more than anything that's because Steve Bond, while good, isn't as remarkable as the original Darby Hinton, or Ronn Moss after, who was also a step down from Hinton. I realized when I wrote the Hard Ticket to Hawaii review that I'd jumped the gun on when Sidaris moved from lessening the role of the Abilene who can't shoot straight character and making Dona Speir the lead, as it wasn't this movie, but the next one, Savage Beach. I think I've mentioned this before, but that run by Speir in her seven Sidaris films has to put her up there as one of the greatest female action leads. When you look at some of the names people generally throw out there like Milla Jovovich and Angelina Jolie, she's right up there with the number of credits, and she was doing it before them. For me I might have her top five, after Pam Grier, Cynthia Rothrock, Michelle Yeoh, and Zoe Saldana. After Speir I'd have names like Michelle Rodriguez, Jovovich, Jolie, etc. Yes, these movies are a lot of fun, and have a lot of T n' A, but that shouldn't diminish from what Speir was doing here and her role as an all-time action lead.

Obregon's hatchet men were played by Keith Cooke and Bruce Penhall. For Cooke, this was his first role before he jumps into Rothrock's China O'Brien series as Dakota. He also used his birth surname here, Hirabayashi--Cooke is his mother's maiden name. He doesn't do any martial arts in this, which is kind of too bad, considering Harold Diamond is in this, I'd love to have seen them get after it. Penhall of course would come to be known for these films, but in this first of the 8 he did, he plays a baddie. It's like the Fast and Furious movies where the baddies join the good guys in later films, only instead of the mental gymnastics required to believe that after Jason Statham's character was trying to murder Vin Diesel that that would suddenly be water under the bridge; here Sidaris just has Penhall play different characters, first Bruce Christian in the Speir films, and then Chris Cannon when the series shifts to being led by Julie Strain.

This is our second Harold Diamond film on the site, the first being when we did Hard Ticket to Hawaii. He's a fascinating specimen of the late 80s/early 90s. The hair, the voice, the shirts and jumpsuits that absolutely must be worn open, it all works so much on that level; but at the same time, he's a great martial artist, which makes him a lot of fun to watch. Especially good here was his fight scene with Dennis Alexio, which Diamond choreographed. Looking at his IMDb bio, he hasn't done much. He has 10 credits, but as far as what we'd do here, he has these two Sidaris movies, two Amir Shervan films, a Zagarino actioner, and then in 2017 he was in an Asylum joint, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, where he plays Merlin. Interestingly enough, that was going to be the film I was going to do for their DTVC Hall of Fame induction post, not knowing Diamond was in it, but I opted for Fast and Fierce: Death Race instead after I fell behind and didn't end up doing their post until the May after. Now knowing it has Diamond makes it more intriguing.

Finally, this movie has something in common with another film released the same year, The Secret of King Mahi's Island, they both have explosives attached to a boomerang used as a weapon. Unlike the Daniels flick that uses it to blow up a helicopter, in this it's used to blow up Penhall. Was this a case of polygenesis, or was there an explosive boomerang that predated these movies as the inspiration? I thought maybe a Bond movie I've never seen may have done it, but I couldn't find anything. Also there was the DC baddie Captain Boomerang, who employed explosive boomerangs. Could Sidaris and one of the writers of The Secret of King Mahi's Island have been into comics and liked the idea of that? One element of this movie that I'm pretty sure was sui generis, was the use of Chekhov's Pacemaker. In the opening of the film we find out that baddie John Aprea has a pacemaker, and as we know, you can't mention that a character has a pacemaker in the opening unless you plan to use it at the end, which Sidaris does. How he does is another stroke of brilliance: a homing missile launched from a modified crutch.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now, this is available to stream free here in the US on Tubi. Take advantage of it while you can, because last year these were all taken down. At that time, when they were all available, I watched all 12 in preparation of my podcast episode with Mitch, so when Letterboxd told me who my most watched director and actor of the year were, I got Sidaris and Obregon. So far this year Sidaris is behind Scorsese for me, 4 to 2; but Obregon is way behind guys like Adkins, Dolph, Zagarino, and Hues, especially after I did a bunch of their movies in anticipation of podcast episodes on them. It looks like I need to binge another complete series to get them both back up there.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095867

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

China O'Brien II (1991)

This was a tough get. It's only available on VHS, and it's not always cheap. For a site like this though, China O'Brien II is a must, considering it's one of the roles Cynthia Rothrock is most associated with. Plus, Richard Norton, Keith Cooke, and a special appearance by DTVC favorite Billy Blanks doesn't hurt either.

China O'Brien II picks up about two years after part 1 leaves off. While China has cleaned up her small town, a big time drug dealer has escaped from prison, and the guy who sent him away just happens to be living in witness protection in her town, with his wife and her daughter, the former who happens to be China's friend, and the latter who happens to be dating Dakota (Keith Cooke). It's just the drug dealer's dumb luck that of all the small towns in all the world, the guy who ratted on him and made off with his $5 million dollars would choose the one that has Rothrock, Cooke, and Norton as its police force. Poor him.

This is what you came for. Good, solid, straight ahead, DTV late 80s/early 90s action. Rothrock is good, Norton is good, and Cooke is good, plus there's a small cameo at the end by Billy Blanks (more on that later). I say this a lot here, but they don't make movies like this anymore, and that's too bad. It starts off small and builds the action up, getting better each time, with well choreographed fights that look great, combined with the requisite gunshots and explosions. This might not be the best of the best, but this is exactly the kind of film that kept me coming back to my video store for more of the same.

As I mentioned above, China O'Brien might be the character Cynthia Rothrock is most known for, and here you can see why. They really do a great job of flipping the classic masculine hero paradigm, and make her a strong lead who never defers to another male--even with an alpha dude like Richard Norton--in fact, he defers to her. On top of that, she has some really great martial arts sequences, driving home just why she's cast as the action lead. This with part 1 make an excellent Rothrock double feature.

He's huge! Good ol' Richard Norton is back, reprising his role as Matt from the first go-'round. He and Rothrock are like the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire of DTV action. He does a great job here of letting her take the lead, but coming in and kicking ass when he's needed too. Beyond the fighting, there's also the funeral scene where he rocks a Canadian tuxedo. How cool is that? Everyone else is in black--even Keith Cooke, though it is his leather jacket--and there's Norton, Canadian tuxedo, looking as if he's about to hit the bar to catch the Flames/Oilers game with some buds and throw back some Rolling Rocks. Classic.

Keith Cooke is back again, though his Dakota character is given almost a Robin plot tract. Based on how sick his skills are, it felt kind of weird. He dates the step-daughter of the guy the drug dealer wants, and she's in high school. Keith Cooke, in his early thirties, playing someone young enough to pick up a high school chick? Was he that young in the first one? Then he's kidnapped by the drug dealer along with the wife and step-daughter and held for ransom to force the guy to bring the cash he stole. To me, none of that works. What worked was him being the quiet, mysterious loner who kicks tons of ass, especially when we see his sweet skill set. He's no Robin, more like the Martian Manhunter.

Yes, that handsome devil in the tangerine tank top is Billy Blanks. He's also wearing zebra print pants there. He has a small, uncredited part as the drug dealer's extra hired muscle called in for the final siege of the small town. He has only a few scenes, then one fight with Cooke that isn't quite as good as their fight in King of the Kickboxers. Considering the film only had like an 81-minute running time, an extra five to beef up that fight scene wouldn't have been so bad. My only complaint for an otherwise great flick.

To buy this on Amazon might cost you in the $10 to $15 range, which for me is a little expensive for a used VHS. Your better bet is to just keep your eye out in a bargain bin or a flea market or Goodwill, then, if you don't see it, maybe fork over that kind of cash. Unfortunately this isn't available on DVD.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101579/

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/

Heatseeker (1995)

I'm always conflicted at the DTVC on whether I'd rather write the blog from the stand point of a regularly occurring phenomenon, or as an archive of film reviews that someone can go to and look at each one independent of the others. For instance, when I found my buddy's VHS of Heatseeker, I thought it would be great to review on the same week I planned on reviewing The One-Armed Swordsman and Master of the Flying Guillotine, because it was so similar to those two. On the other hand, if someone just clicks on the Albert Pyun or Gary Daniels tags, or a link in a future blog to them or anyone else associated with this movie, that provenance of the original post won't mean as much. I guess what I try to do is write for both types of reader, the everyday and the future visitor.

Heatseeker takes place in 2019-20, and is about corporations who specialize in cybernetic implants that enhance people's lives. Norbert Weisser is the evil CEO and head designer of one corporation, and he has completely outfitted Gary Daniels with state of the art equipment, and wants to show him off by having him fight against every other cybernetic implant corporation's best fighter. He also wants Keith Cooke, the world's best un-enhanced martial artist to compete, and when he refuses, Weisser kidnaps his woman and makes him. Can Cooke use the one quality humans have over machines, his heart, to prevail over the Tin Man Gary Daniels?



Some of the reviews of this film were pretty harsh, and though I wasn't a huge fan of it either, I think I see what Pyun was going for, and I was a fan of that. It looked like he wanted to take the Hong Kong cinema element of the handicapped fighter, the Zen concept of using a detriment to one's benefit, and put it in a futuristic setting. Instead of a one-armed boxer, Pyun's hero's one handicap is that he's a human fighting cyborgs, and the way he can use that handicap to his advantage is to be as human as possible. Again, I love the idea, it was the execution that was sautéed in wrong sauce. By having Cooke's character be forced into fighting, as opposed to fighting on his own to prove a point, we're forced to suffer through Cooke being knocked around for the first chunk of the film, so when he prevails at the end, it's much less believable. Imagine this: Cooke's lady forbids him to go, but he goes anyway, leaving her waiting at a hotel, just like the One-Armed Swordsman. Why not have him willingly fight, and no one else believe he has a chance because he's a human?

As you see I went with Gary Daniels' Max Headroom look. I've never understood the idea of making the lead actor's eyes a weird color. Remember when Terminal Justice did the same thing with Lorenzo Lamas. Anyway, Daniels was the baddie, but his martial arts were still pretty sweet. I would say, as far as DTVC Hall of Famers go, this was clearly Pyun's film, and Daniels was just along for the ride, as Keith Cooke was the hero, and it was more of a Pyun and Cooke film than a Pyun and Daniels film. Firepower will probably be our next Daniels film, whenever we get to it.



This film is a rarity in that it employs Keith Cooke, not as a part of the supporting cast, but as the main hero. Unfortunately, because he gets his ass kicked for a good chunk of the movie, he wasn't as good as he could've been, but I don't put that on him. Ever wonder what Mr. Cooke has been up to? Check this video out on YouTube.

One of the worst plot devices in movies is the play-by-play guy. Few things sound worse than an actor reading from a script, trying to mimic the spontaneity of real play-by-play accompanying a real sporting event. I see what Pyun was going for with it. The tournament was very Master of the Flying Guillotine and Enter the Dragon (Mr. Weisser, I think I'd like to leave your island), and the play-by-play, along with the TV screens and cyber martial artists, were supposed to follow that Cyber-Punk-fused-with-Hong-Kong-cinema paradigm. Again, cool idea, but just didn't translate well on the screen-- at least for me.



If you play the Albert Pyun drinking game, you know the key is looking for how many of his ubiquitous mainstays pop up in his various films. This time we had the aforementioned Weisser (who has the distinction of being his number one mainstay), Tim Thomerson, and Thom Mathews. Vincent Klyn must've been busy. The shot above, featuring two mainstays, would mean you'd have to drink double. One interesting thing to point out while we're on the subject of Norbert Weisser, and with last week's post on Hard Boiled, is that Weisser starred in Schindler's List, which just happens to be my number one film of the 90s.

I can't recommend a film based on effort or a cool idea that didn't quite come off. If you're looking for Hong Kong cinema fused with Cyber Punk, Albert Pyun actually has some great ones, like Cyborg and Nemesis; and then there's Omega Doom, which was a great Kurosawa fused with Cyber Punk flick. If what we're saying is one out of four didn't work, I'd say that isn't a bad ratio; and there were a lot of aspects of Heatseeker that did work, it was just the ones that didn't were enough to overshadow the ones that did. Also, this movie is only available on VHS. Figured I'd throw that out there.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113278/

The King of the Kickboxers (1990)

My friend Kenner at Movies in the Attic has been on me about this one for a while, and when I did Tough and Deadly starring Billy Blanks a couple weeks ago, he put on a full-court press, hitting me with e-mails containing YouTube and Amazon links letting me know all the myriad ways I could experience this gem. I finally got a hold of it and made it happen on my own.

The King of the Kickboxers is about this undercover cop in New York who's always getting into trouble and living life by the seat of his tight acid wash jeans. Anyway, the chief wants to get rid of him for a little while, and sends him to Thailand to work on a snuff film case. It's not what you think: American fighters are being duped into acting in action films where they're really killed, and the killer is Billy Blanks. Our hero remembers Blanks, because Blanks killed his brother ten years before when they were in Thailand and the brother won a kickboxing tournament. Anyway, when our hero gets there, he finds out he's not ready yet, and luckily the Native American from China O'Brien is willing to give him a hand. Can our hero defy the odds and take down Blanks?



I don't know where to begin. First off, it's awesome. It starts with this title graphic that looks like an SNK Neo-Geo video game, then moves into some of the most poorly choreographed kickboxing in a ring you'll ever see. Just when you think this is a sack of asscrack, the kickboxer and his little brother (who grows up to be our hero) are attacked by Billy Blanks and his boys. Blanks then proceeds to blow up a golf cart with machine gun fire, letting us know that this is the official start of the film. It only gets more amazing from there. Jerry Trimble has (unfortunately) a small part as a two-sweet mulleted drug dealer, and our hero takes him and his goons down, just carrying over the energy from the Blanks scene before it. The action is stellar, the martial arts some of the best you'll see, and the acting and plot, though woeful, only enhance the experience, as opposed to detracting from it.

Billy Blanks as a baddie martial artist is great. I'm not exaggerating when I say he's up there with Michel Qissi as Tong Po or Bolo Yeung as anything. This is key to any great bad action film, as the baddie must make us detest him enough, yet at the same time respect his fighting skills and fear him. If our hero isn't facing an enormous challenge, or we aren't rooting for him either, the film isn't fun, and that's what we're in this for, to have fun. On top of all this, the end fight between he and our hero did a great job of paying us back for our investment, as it was worthy of Blanks's baddie and the work our hero put in in montage time to defeat him.



If I have one complaint though, it was how little Jerry Trimble there was. I know he was just getting started in the film industry, but still. The mullet was amazing, and the martial arts were tight. You know a movie is good when they can have a talent like Trimble in it for only one scene, and still be as awesome as The King of the Kickboxers was. Other people you may recognize were Ong Soo Han, who, like Billy Blanks, has starred in an action film with Rowdy Roddy Piper; Sherrie Rose as the love interest; and Don Stroud as our hero's contact in Thailand. Again, a great cast that just enhanced a great film.

Mr. Kenner remarked, and I agreed with him, that the late Richard Jaekel as the police captain was one of the best we've seen in a role like that. Whether you agree with us or not, what's interesting to note here is that we're remarking on an actor's job playing the police captain in a bad action movie versus other actors we've seen do the same part. We've seen that many bad action films that we're examining the art of the police chief. I'll have you know, though, that I passed up a used DVD copy of Guns and Lipstick at my local record store last night because they wanted $8 for it. I might be a self-professed connoisseur, but I'm not crazy.



I imagine the picture above has already told you where I'm going with this last paragraph. Loren Avedon, our hero, is shown here sporting... a Fanny Pack! Unlike David Bradley's similar fashion disaster in Cyborg Cop, though, King of the Kickboxers was a solid enough movie to transcend something so atrocious. Still, even if the point of the fanny pack was to have Avedon's undercover character come off as a naive dork looking for a fight, the tacky shirt and white pants were sufficient. The Fanny Pack is an abomination, and I can't let even a film as great as this one off the hook for such a felonious transgression.

To give you an idea of how awesome this movie is, I captured 12 images of it (which you can find on the image page), and that was me showing restraint. There might be another 20 to 30 other scenes that'll make you laugh, make you pump your fist, or just make you nod your head in understanding that what you got here is good. Find it on YouTube, buy it on Amazon, or scoop it a local used retailer. Whatever you gotta do, make it happen. You won't be disappointed.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102217/

China O'Brien (1990)

It's taken me forever to get a copy of this. First Netflix said they had it, but then it went from Very Long Wait to Unavailable. So I went to Amazon, but it was too expensive both on DVD and VHS. Finally, after months of waiting, someone put it up for sale used on Amazon at a price I could handle, and I snatched it up. The whole process has been slightly disconcerting, because I have a DTV movie blog, and I have Cynthia Rothrock in the Hall of Fame, but I didn't have a review for her seminal film.

China O'Brien is a Walking Tall remake with Cynthia Rothrock as a big city cop who goes back to her small home town and finds it taken over by a gang of criminals that own the judges and fire department. They also have a guy in the sheriff's department, and when the sheriff, Rothrock's dad, dies, this guy wants his job. Rothrock runs against him in order to take the town back in the name of law and order.



This movie's amazing. I don't know where to begin. Spectacular martial arts. Cynthia Rothrock and Richard Norton at their best. Amazing music. Action almost non-stop. In places where you can't imagine a fight scene, a fight scene happens. They just don't make movies like this anymore. Why remake Fame when you can remake this? This is what the art of film is all about.

We finally did it. This is the film that, more than any other, got Cynthia Rothrock into the Hall of Fame. She's just utterly fantastic. She's also pretty hot. In one scene, she beats the crap out of a guy who grabs her ass. I wonder how many times that's happened to her in real life. I'd love to see some guy grab her butt, and watch her kick the crap out of him. I have no time for random butt grabbers. Do those guys think women enjoy that? Do they somehow think they aren't the biggest losers ever when they do that? Anyway, I'm getting off topic. Pretty much everything else I do from Rothrock will be a step down from China O'Brien, but that's okay. She still has many more films to look at, and I'm just glad we finally got her best one up here.



Richard Norton stars with her again. I think this might be one of his best roles too. What I loved was the movie cast him, despite his Australian accent, in the role of a guy who grew up in the same small town Rothrock did. They didn't try to explain it, they didn't try to hide it, they just did it. More movies need to do that. Jean Claude Van Damme does not always have to be from New Orleans to explain his accent. Just have him grow up in a small country town too. Norton is looking to join Rothrock in the Hall of Fame this October.

The Walking Tall paradigm pops up often in DTV films. I would say this version of it, then Gary Busey's Eye of the Tiger, are the two best. Road House is close, but it lacks two elements: one, Swayze comes from out of town, he's not a native come home; and two, he never becomes sheriff, he remains a legendary bouncer. Personally, I prefer the Road House paradigm more, even if it's never been used by another movie (Road House 2, I guess). China O'Brien would've been better had Rothrock returned home after making her name as a famous bouncer in the big city. My only qualm with the film, if you can call it that.



Now that I have software that captures images from both DVD and VHS, I only have to search the Internet for images of the cover. Usually I find them from sites selling them or from fellow reviewers. This time, though, I found a site that had covers from a whole slew of Imperial Entertainment VHS's. It was really cool, and it brought be back to my earlier days of watching DTV films. Check it out:
http://www.critcononline.com/imperial_entertainment_vhs_covers.htm

This is a must for any action film fan. It doesn't get any better. I didn't tag it as VHS only, because it was available at one time on DVD. I have no idea why it's out of print, or if there are any plans to rerelease it, but it's a travesty that this movie's not at places like Netflix. Considering some of the films available on DVD, a classic like this one should be a no brainer.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099260/