The Weapon (2023)

This is one I've had in my "to-review" box for a while--if that box even exists. I'm not sure what it would even be, like an old Amazon box? "Why do we have this Amazon box sitting around?" "It's my 'to-review' box." "But it's empty." "Of course, this is all done virtually. Duh." This was also featured in episode 135 of the pod, which I did with Ty from Comeuppance back in October of 2023.

The Weapon is something of a Tony Schiena vanity project starring him, directed by him, and co-written by him. He plays Dallas Ultio, some enforcer for a secret organization, but he also has a beef with bikers because they beat his dad to death when he was a kid. As he's taking down bikers, the woman in his life, AnnaLynne McCord, is kidnapped by Richard Grieco, and he's holding her in some bunker he has. This will be Dallas's biggest challenge yet, but he has a bunch of names here to help him in one- or two-scene cameos so their names can be added to the tin.

And it's those names that manage to keep this thing afloat, but ultimately can't fully save it--though that may actually play in its favor as well. This had potential, but it had too many moving parts, and was tonally off in spots. The scene from Schiena's past where as a kid he watches his dad get beaten to death by a biker was funny, and I know it wasn't meant to be. There's another scene where Schiena burns crooked cop Randall Batinkoff alive that didn't do anything to help Schiena's character. This wasn't like they were fighting and in the course of battle set him ablaze, he had Batinkoff tied to some scaffolding or something. Always love heroes setting helpless baddies on fire. Then we have AnnaLyne McCord screaming about something out of nowhere near the end. It was like, are you in the right movie? While we did have some good fights, even that seemed off, like sometimes Schiena was an unstoppable force, others--for the convenience of the plot I guess--he could be taken out rather easily. On the other hand, as a vanity project, there's an earnestness to this that makes it work in spite of itself in a so-bad-it's-good vein. Schiena wants this to work, he isn't just pulling in a bunch of names to put on the tin so he can sell it, and that earnestness does make it endearing despite all the shortcomings. Also, those names I mentioned helped, especially at the very end when we had Jeff Fahey and Bruce Dern seemingly riffing off each other. We've seen a lot worse here, and we've also seen better, but overall I think this works in a low-budget schlock way, like a Samurai Cop kind of thing, which at 85 minutes for free on Tubi may get you to the church on time.

I didn't realize this, but this is actually the fourth time we've seen Tony Schiena on the site, the last two times being Circle of Pain and Locked Down in late 2010, both films directed by the late Daniel Zirilli. (If you're wondering, the other time was the Van Damme flick Wake of Death, which we did in 2007.) As an action lead he's solid enough, but this is where we get the ol' vanity project catch-22: he's not a high-enough tier of star to get the lead roles in bigger DTV action flicks, so he's forced into making his own vanity projects if he wants the better roles, but those vanity projects are going to end up like this. I was looking at his filmography on IMDb, and he doesn't have much since 2010's Locked Down, so it sounds about right that something like this that he directs and co-writes is the only way he's going to get the work he wants, and somehow he's able to lump a bunch of names in and that gets the thing funded, and having those names gets me and Ty to cover it on the pod and me to review it here.

And boy did we have names. I mentioned Richard Grieco, who looks like a cross between someone cosplaying John Wick and Alice Cooper in the "Poison" video--more on that below. How fantastic is that? This is now 7 films for him on the DTVC. We also have Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. in a one-scene cameo as some kind of mysterious blind man. Your guess is as good as mine, but that one scene now makes 13 films for him on the site, which might be the most by an Oscar winner. While he hasn't won an Oscar, Bruce Dern has been nominated twice, and has become something of a darling on the DTVC podcast episodes I do with Ty. His scene at the end of this with Jeff Fahey is fantastic, the best moment of the movie, which left us with a feeling of "where have you been all our lives? We needed you earlier!" This makes 11 for Fahey, which seems low for him, but it makes sense when you consider we don't really seek out more Fahey, he just happens when we're watching a movie with someone else that also has him in it.

Back when I reviewed Lady Terror for director/writer/star Nathan Hill, I talked about how I didn't get the joke right away, because we see so many vanity project movies that look like that one but are completely serious and being played completely straight, and while I think this isn't the worst of those, it does have those moments that would have me thinking I missed the joke in Hill's film. There were also moments though where I liked Schiena and was rooting for him, so it wasn't all bad. But therein lies the rub, I guess: it's hard to root for a guy when you know he's making a movie to make himself the hero. It almost would be better, if a vanity project is going to play it straight, to have the writer/director person be the baddie, and bring on someone else to be the hero. There isn't as much side eye there, or "oh aren't you so great" cynicism on the part of the watcher. Making a movie, no matter how good or bad, is an accomplishment in itself, and I think from a vanity project standpoint, taking as much of the "vanity" out of it can really help and get us to appreciate more the mere accomplishment of it. By the same token, Ty and I discussed on the podcast how sometimes the vanity project is what gives us that earnestness that makes it work in spite of itself, because Schiena wants this to be good, so maybe vanity projects aren't all bad if they're giving us the so-bad-it's-good element.

Finally, I recently put our podcast on the DTV Connoisseur YouTube page. In the process, YouTube was going through the episodes to see if any had potential copyrighted material. There were some from the early iteration with Jamie that were flagged because I had included Wham's "Last Christmas" in the intros when we were recording them around Christmastime. That made sense, but when I saw that this episode was flagged for Alice Cooper's "Poison," it didn't make any sense. I mentioned it to Ty, and he reminded me that he played the opening to it when we were talking about how much Grieco looked like him in this film. He even asked "is it okay to play this on here?"--which for a Spotify podcast it was, but YouTube caught it right away. What that means is, if you do check the podcast out on YouTube, this episode won't be on there.

But that's okay, you can still find it on Spotify, iTunes, and other major podcatchers, episode 135 in the archives. As far as the movie goes, Tubi is the way to go. This is a schlock bad actioner that kind of works in a Samurai Cop so-bad-it's-good kind of way, which might be enough for you.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18228142

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Fury of the Fist and the Golden Fleece (2018)

In furthering our celebration of Cynthia Rothrock joining the 40 Club, I figured I'd finally give this one a look. Not only does it have her, but two other 30 Club actors, Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Michael Dudikoff. On the other hand, for a film with all these names, it seemed suspicious that none of the other usual suspects had covered this, and it only had two critic reviews and 10 user reviews. Let's see if the suspicions were warranted.

Fury of the Fist and the Golden Fleece is, beyond being a difficult title to type, an attempted send-up of old grindhouse movies about a guy named the Fist who hilariously is both a martial arts fighter and a former porn star--trust me, I'm laughing on the inside. Stuff happens though, and he finds he has to fight people, along with a couple friends, and eventually that leads him to the head baddie, played by Michael Dudikoff. Other stuff happens, including a lot of dick jokes, fights, and all kinds of computer generated video effects, for roughly an hour and 40 minutes, and then for 7 minutes more stuff happens as the credits roll. But it does have a lot of names that make cameos, so there's that.

Between my 4th and 5th years of college--yes, I took five years to get my BA--I dated a girl who had two kids, one that wae three, and the other not quite two. One of the times I was over there, the mother was changing the not quite two-year-old, and while she was getting the diaper, he got away and started peeing. He was so fascinated that urine was coming out of his penis, that he ran over to show me, and I was like "yeah, it does that, isn't that crazy?" Beyond the fact that it's hard to think that that almost two-year-old is old enough to drink now, this movie smacked of a couple guys who just learned what their penis can do, and watching it, I felt like the adult saying "yes, it does that, isn't that crazy?" It wasn't just that the film was full of dick jokes, but they were like "penises are so great, I can't believe I'm just learning about mine!" Whether they were dick jokes or other kinds of jokes, they often didn't quite come off like they should have, and when they did hit, they didn't know when to stop. It was like if you've ever been at a party and told a joke everyone thought was funny, and another guy there thinks he's funny too, so he follows you around and tells you a bunch of jokes that for the most part don't work, but when one lands he goes back to that well over and over, and you're just trying to get away. There were some fun moments though. I think had it been shorter, had a comedic writer helped with the jokes, and if the two stars--one of whom was director and co-writer, the other of whom was the other writer--had not been in it and they left the film to the stars they cast, it might have worked. Unfortunately for me it was a miss, and I guess that's why it doesn't have more buzz considering those names.

Because I'm including this as part of the celebration for Rothrock joining the 40 Club, I'll start with her, even though she's barely in the movie. She has one quick fight scene, which was good, but we could've had more. For example, we had Jean-Claude Van Damme's daughter Bianca Brigitte, why didn't we have a fight scene between those two? That would've been more compelling than a lot of what we ended up with. Also, the big plot device was that our Fist character eats meatballs that have estrogen in them, and he loses his mojo. So too much estrogen means someone can't kick ass? Beyond the fact that that kind of joke was more appropriate in the 90s, how can you have kickass women like Rothrock and Bianca Van Damme and say that our hero ingesting estrogen makes him weak? I'll take the Pepsi challenge with Rothrock's stuff over this any day.

 

Close on Rothrock's heels for his own inclusion in the 40 Club, we're now at 38 for Don "The Dragon" Wilson--though it seems like two films we tagged him in, Saigon Commandos and The Siege of Firebase Gloria, have been removed from his IMDb bio, so he may only be at 36. In this he has a bigger part than Rothrock, which is nice. He played a fun send-up to the 70s Hong Kong martial arts master. I'd be interested to see how he did with more of these roles, like maybe something done by Michael Jai White who has a good mix of a keen sense of humor and fantastic martial arts skills. In Black Dynamite he had some send-ups to the old martial arts movie that came off really well, and the way Wilson carried his part off here, it would be fun to see what they could do together. As far as the 40 Club for him, he has three movies on Tubi that I can do, so that'll be easy to get one more--Scorpion King 4 is one I've seen, but didn't get any images before it was removed from Tubi, so I'm waiting for it to come around again. The question then is, where could he go from there? He's making more stuff, so we could potentially get another 10 movies from there, it's just a matter I guess of how many more older ones get dropped from IMDb for technically not having him in them.

We last saw Michael Dudikoff here back in January of 2020, and that was the first time since we'd done In Her Defense in 2011. This is now 33 films for him--he has 34 tags because we did American Ninja 2 twice--and I don't see us getting that many more unless he has a greater outburst of films, but that may be okay for him, he's already given us a lot of greats. His role here as the main baddie was one of the few real standouts in this to me. The Joker make-up combined with the maniacal nature, I'd love to see him do more crazy baddies in DTV flicks. Like if they ever made a DTV Expendables, where maybe you have Rothrock, Wilson, and Daniels as the heroes, they could have Fred Williamson as the Machine Gun Joe type, and Dudikoff as the baddie, and maybe Matthias Hues as his hatchet man. Oh, maybe add in Dacascos with that trio of heroes too. Should we tack on Gruner too? Anyway, let's get this DTV Expendables made, and load up all those names in a film all us DTV action fans can enjoy.

Finally, making a movie a comedy sometimes has the effect of insulating it from criticism. "Of course that was bad, you just don't get the joke, we made it bad on purpose!" I get that, and the point could be made that I just didn't get the humor here, or it wasn't my style. It just seemed like overall there wasn't a lot of cohesion, people just show up, there's a bunch of close-ups and sound effects, then they fight and CGI blood appears, and then we go to more things happening that make no sense, close-ups and sound effects, and more fights and CGI blood splatters. In once scene, there's this fight at the bagel burger place the hero and his friends work at, and he does this back kick thing to the baddies over and over. I get repeating the scene if you only have 60 minutes of footage and need to stretch things, but the movie was an hour and 47 minutes! It needed to cut things, not extend the joke. Another scene, the director's character kicks a baddie holding a gun, which causes the baddie to shoot another baddie. It was funny, but then they repeat it. Again. And again. Like over ten times. And it's like "it's hilarious, the guy keeps getting shot with CGI blood splatters and he's yelling in pain!" Going back to Black Dynamite or Machete and why those worked, I think a big part of it was the people making those lived in the 70s and 80s during the Grindhouse era, so they got the vibe better, whereas the guys making this were younger, more my age, and there was almost a sense that they were trying to remake Machete or Black Dynamite more. For me, this would've worked at 80 minutes, played a little bit straighter, but still as a comedy, with Don Frye's character as the hero. Just get rid of the characters played by the director and his co-writer, maybe do 30% of the dick jokes--which may still be more dick jokes than any other movie--and let the guest stars, of which there were many, do their things.

But ultimately we didn't get that, and what we did get didn't work for me. As of this writing you can get this on Tubi here in the States. Maybe if you're a completist of the stars like me, you make it happen, otherwise beware the siren song of all these names calling you in. It seems this was ignored by the usual suspects for a reason.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2490148

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Assassin X aka The Chemist (2016)

When I came back from hiatus, I was looking at Dolph Lundgren and Gary Daniels's numbers, and started to think about who else had 40+ and 30+ movies reviewed on the DTVC, and from there gave that status a special recognition with the 40 and 30 Clubs. Kind of like how there's the baseball Hall of Fame, but also players in the 500 and 600 home run club. Anyway, I had Art Camacho just below 40, and was going to use this film to celebrate him joining the 40 Club--until I checked again and found 3 movies he was in that hadn't been tagged yet, putting him already above that milestone. I guess instead it's just an Art Camacho celebration, which is well-deserved as well.

Assassin X has DTVC Hall of Famer Oliver Gruner as a well-paid assassin who uses poisons to avoid any hand-to-hand combat. When it's time to kill a young woman he's taken a fancy to though, he turns on his employers, led by Patrick KilPatrick. Now the bounty is on his head, the hunter has become the hunted--but this prey strikes back!

I saw on imdb that this film won awards, and while I can see why, I also ran into the issue where the shaky cam was so pervasive that I needed Dramamine. That kind of shocked me a bit, because one of the awards this won was for Camacho's fight choreography, so why distort something so great behind a mess of shaky cam and quick edit effects? One thing I've learned over time is that that may not have even been Camacho's call, meaning we don't know who to blame for my nausea. I think without it, this really would have worked in that slimmed-down stylized actioner format, especially with someone like Gruner in the lead, and with Camacho's fight choreography. The other issue is the film's runtime. 102 versus 90 minutes doesn't seem like a big difference, but in movie terms it is, especially in a film like this where the added minutes run contrary to the slimmed-down stylized actioner tone. Overall though, I feel like the good outweighs the bad here, and especially appreciate that this wasn't just cobbled together and shot on the quick in Michigan or Baton Rouge to try and get it on Red Box and Prime as soon as possible; Camacho and the rest of the cast and crew involved are invested in trying to make something great, and it paid off in the awards the film won--and for me makes me want to judge it with the respect it deserves, even if parts of it didn't work for me.

This is no longer the post I had planned it be in celebrating Camacho's entrance into the 40 Club. Before writing this I discovered that he was an inaugural member along with Dolph, Daniels, and Albert Pyun, I had just missed a few films that he had worked on as either stuntman or fight choreographer. Just the same, he is someone whose DTV work deserves to be celebrated just because of the scope and influence he's had over the years. I was looking at his directing work, and he did one of my all time favorite PM Entertainment flicks, Recoil. I'm not expecting every film he does to be Recoil, but there are some elements in that that this didn't have that may have helped it work better. First, no shaky cam; second, a shorter runtime with more action--Recoil hits the ground running and instantly grabs us and won't let go. This film was ambitious in different ways from Recoil, and I appreciate the attempt, it just wasn't the home run Recoil was for me.

It's good to see Gruner back on the DTVC. Yes, he had a small cameo in Showdown in Manilla, but seeing him here as the lead reminds us why that cameo he, Rothrock, and Wilson had was so sauteed in wrong sauce. It's just fun to watch him kicking ass, and between scenes, be the coolest guy in the room. One thing I realized when I was going over his imdb bio to see what other films of his I could do in the future, was that I had totally forgotten to do Sector 4: Extraction, which was written by friend of the site Richard Pierce. He had asked me to review it right before I went on hiatus, and I lost track of it. For that Richard, I'm really sorry, but hopefully we'll get to it soon!

Martin Kove is the film's other Hall of Famer, and like many roles for him, he's not in this too much. On the other hand, he's in this much more than he's been in some other stuff we've seen that credits him. He unfortunately has the distinction of being one of the Hall of Famers with the fewest tags, yet maybe has the biggest filmography, so we have a lot of places we can go to get more of his films up on the DTVC, the issue is finding the ones where he has a bigger role--and I'd settle for a role as big as the one he had here!

Finally, when we see Gruner make his first kill, he has a dog with him that he needs to get rid of, so he just gives it to a child. Very irresponsible pet guardianship I'd say. You adopt a dog to get your hit, then pawn it off on some kid? What if the kid can't keep him? The parents drop the poor fella off at a shelter, then what? You hope he gets adopted again, but there's no guarantee. What if it's a kill shelter? So you've just killed an innocent dog just because you need to get close enough to poison your target? That's the hero we're rooting for? A dog killer? It's little details like that that can make or break a movie. Hopefully in the next Gruner/Camacho collaboration, we'll have a little more respect for our furry companions who aren't able to advocate for themselves.

And with that, let's wrap this up. For a Camacho celebration film, this may not have been his best--I reserve that honor for Recoil--but I think it's an earnest attempt to work outside the box and do something a little different in the action genre. The fact that it's available to stream for free on Tubi means you're only investing your time, which is still very valuable, but at least you're not out as much if you end up disappointed.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3616894

AE: Apocalypse Earth (2013)

This is an Asylum joint that I saw on Instant, and it listed Adrian Paul and Richard Grieco as its stars.  The whole thing looked really fun, so I figured I'd give it a shot.  Let's see how it went.

AE: Apocalypse Earth takes place in the future, where we're being attacked by aliens, and it looks like the aliens are winning.  Humans are trying to colonize other planets, and while Army Lieutenant Adrian Paul is protecting a group of evacuees boarding a ship to one of those planets, he ends up on board it as it takes off, and the ship's captain, Richard Grieco, lets him know that due to the laws of physics, he's on board for the long haul.  After who knows how much time, the ship crash lands on a planet, and the evacuees wake up as an army of invisible aliens are shooting at them.  Now it's up to Paul and the survivors to get their ship fixed and get off that planet before they all die, and in that endeavor they have the help of Lea, a local alien whose people have been hunted by the invisible aliens for generations.  Will they make it?



So this one was fun.  It was a throwback to those 1950s lost island adventure kind of things.  The end was a little weird and convoluted, and one thing I don't like about these throwback things, is that they can call the hokey ending an homage to the hokey endings those films in the 50s had, which to me is a cop out.  I don't want to get into the ending because it will give too much away, but it was kind of predictable, and then had an awkward element on top of it that betrayed what the film was before it, which was both fun, and, to a large extent, well executed.  It was as if in the ending the old Asylum reared its ugly head, and I was seeing Transmorphers; but before that we were treated to that new, more consistently better Asylum, and I think that's what counts.  Overall it was a good time.

Back when we started this blog, the expectation was that Adrian Paul would be a big part of it, that his post Highlander: The Series acting career would be in a lot of DTV flicks, and we'd be reviewing a ton of them.  In fact, our third ever review was a Paul film, The Breed.  That makes it all the more crazy then that in the over 900 reviews since then, this is only the fourth Paul film review, giving him now a whopping five total.  That's too bad, because he is one of my favorite syndicated TV actors of all time on one of my favorite syndicated TV shows of all time.  Who knows how he got so lost in the shuffle, especially when we have so many alums from Highlander: The Series on the blog.  Anyway, he was great in this movie, second only to Bali Rodriguez for me, meaning my lapse in reviewing his films has been a mistake on my part, and one I hope to rectify.



What do we do with Richard Grieco?  This is not the first time we've seen him here either, nor is this his first Asylum joint, having played Loki in their mockbuster of Thor.  Funny, I don't see a lot of young ladies making gif sets of him on Tumblr like they do Tom Hiddleston-- I haven't seen The Avengers or Thor yet, but I loved him as F. Scott Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris.  Have you ever heard that joke about him?  "Who is this 'Scott Fitzgerald', and why is everyone so upset with him?"  Haha, get it?  F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Wait, wasn't this a paragraph on Richard Grieco?  Oops.  In the film, he gets a concussion in the crash, and from then on he's pretty much just there, popping in and out.  Kind of like this paragraph about him.

There was this gross looking troll-ish guy in the movie who was like the heel trying to cause problems and derail Paul's plans.  I don't know why movies put in characters like this.  Intrigue?  Really, we didn't have enough with the large carnivorous lizards and invisible alien hunters?  So we need someone to annoy us too?  Maybe characters like that were in the 50s versions of these films, but they weren't fun then either.  They were the characters that MST3K dedicated fantastic host segments to, but they did that because they loathed them as much as we did.  Stop putting these characters in your movies.  Please.  They hurt.



I wanted to save the best for last, and that was Bali Rodriguez.  Yes, I know what you're going to say: you're a straight male Matty, of course Bali Rodriguez is the best for you in this movie.  Fine, I'll accept that, but she turned in a better performance than just the hot model in green paint that she was.  Yes, her character was supposed to be that exotic Amazon woman type that those 50s and 60s films objectified, but I think she transcended it.  She gave her character a humanity that made us root for her, and in turn made us root for Paul because he rooted for her too.  All right, maybe I'm just a straight male, but don't hold that against Bali Rodriguez.

And with that, I'll wrap this up.  This is a fun time, and whether you see it on Instant, RedBox, or cable some night-- this one is listed on imdb as "Video", meaning it went DTV without taking the SyFy detour first, so who knows if it'll be on that channel--, it's worth a look.  When the Asylum is right, they're a lot of fun, and I think they were right here.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2756412/

Almighty Thor (2011)

Because Marvel can't copyright Norse mythology, the door was left open for The Asylum in conjunction with the SyFy channel to trade on the big screen adaptation of the Marvel version of Thor. I had originally wanted to go with a joke about how I thought this was called "Almaty Thor", and wanted to know what this Kazakh version of Thor was all about, but I already used that joke on Twitter. I need to be careful and not use up all my best material before I even get a chance to write the review. Also, I first caught wind of this through the post at Cool Target Action Reviews.

Almighty Thor is kind of a Thor prequel, where our hero is a whining, annoying teenager, and his dad, Odin (played by Kevin Nash) is killed by Loki (played by Richard Greico), who wanted to get his hands on the infamous hammer of invincibility or something. Anyway, one of Odin's most trusted warriors, Patricia Velasquez, takes Thor to LA so she can train him, and Loki follows them there, and all hell breaks loose. Can Thor stop being a shithead for two seconds and defeat Loki?



Whose idea was this? "Yeah, I want to do a movie about Thor where he's a whiny, annoying teenager. Like, you know the 16-year-old who bitches about how much he hates his parents because they won't let him have the car, that human embodiment of awesomeness, that's what we're centering the film around." Really? If I want to listen to whiny teenagers, I'll go hang out at the food court at the mall. And for me, because Thor is the main character, it made the whole film a pile of suck. That's too bad, because Greico was awesome as this movies version of Loki, who looks like a cross between Edward Scissorhands and The Borg, but sounds like Christian Slater, and seemed like he was totally having fun with the film; Kevin Nash as Odin was also great, but pretty much wasted, because he barely had any scenes; loved the CGI monsters, total Asylum cheese; and even Patricia Velasquez as a Norse demi-goddess with a South American Spanish accent was pretty sweet. But whining Thor is the killer, as sauteed in wrong sauce as you can get.

As someone who grew up with Marvel comics, Thor was not one I followed. I remember he was in one of the Hulk TV movies, but after that, I didn't care. I was a little surprised they decided to make a movie about him, but I guess Marvel feels like if they make it we will come. I don't know, I didn't see it. I can think of a few that I remember that I'd have rather seen first: Cable, New Mutants/X-Force, Deadpool (not that weird thing they gave us in Wolverine), and maybe some of those space guys like Silver Surfer (I know he was in the Fantastic Four), Thanos, all those aliens and whatnot. Thor was not at the top of my list.



If you're going to do Loki, why not do it the way they did it here with Richard Greico? It was like his theme song should've been Marilyn Manson's cover of "Sweet Dreams", and he should've been walking around LA like Sid Vicious in Urgh! A Music War strolling through Paris, shoving a piece of cake in someone's face. It's a shame that such a fun performance was ruined in a movie that decided to hang it's hat on an annoying teen Thor.

Loved Kevin Nash for his short scenes early in the film, and wish he'd been in this more. I remember when he, as Diesel, first came into the WWF. There was a Royal Rumble where all the guys in the ring ganged up on him to throw him out, and Shaun Michaels, who was his buddy, got in on it too. Hey, it's every man for himself in the Royal Rumble. I haven't watched wrestling in years, but I've heard he was back in the (now) WWE as Diesel. Love to see him get more work in the DTV/TV movie market-- and more than just a scene or two.



All Asylum films have great CGI monsters, and this was no exception. Man, it's so annoying that they went with an annoying teen Thor for the hero. Did he have to be annoying? He could've been a teen but not annoying, right? It was like they were trying to channel Arch hall Jr. Sometimes The Asylum really gets it right, and sometimes they really get it wrong, and sometimes you get something like this that should be so right, but ends up so wrong. Give us Thor attacking big CGI monsters with Kevin Nash and Patricia Velasquez, and Richard Greico as Loki shoving cakes in people's faces. Is that so hard?

But wrong it is, so it's a no go for me. Maybe if you see this on SyFy you might want to watch passively while doing something else. I haven't give this one in awhile, but it has late-night procrastinating on a term paper potential. As far as a rental, whether it's on Netflix or Red Box, don't waste your time. It's not worth it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1792794/

Point Doom (2001)

I first heard of this film when I saw a trailer for it at the beginning of the Don "The Dragon" Wilson film Whatever it Takes. Both films were produced by David DeFalco. In the trailer I saw Richard Greico, Ice-T, and Andrew Dice Clay, and figured it was worth throwing on my Netflix queue. Maybe I'm just subconsciously a glutton for punishment.

Point Doom is about an LA talent agent played by Richard Greico. He's looking for a nice girl to settle down with and thinks he found her at his friend Andrew Dice Clay's strip club in the person of waitress Jennifer O'Dell. The only thing is she's involved with a biker dude (played by the guy who gets his brains blown out by Dolph in Missionary Man) who's very possessive, addicted to drugs, and into it bad after he double-crosses and kills a bunch of fellow bikers for a shit ton of coke. Now Greico's caught up in this tangled web of crap. Is he in over his head? Probably, but not in the world of movies.



This was a pretty bad film. Maybe not even pretty bad, it was atrocious. But it's got so many famous people in it it's hard to write it off immediately. Between Greico, Ice-T, O'Dell, and The Dice Man, it's all right. Then you throw in Angie Everhart in a weird role as a woman with epilepsy, Sebastian Bach as a biker, the guy from Gremlins and Gremlins 2 also as a biker, and then the guy who gets his brains blown out by Dolph in Missionary Man, and just on star power alone you can almost transcend everything else's atrociousness. Maybe that was producer David DeFalco's plan. The reality is you can't polish a turd.

Greico was Greico. I think he was better here than in the depraved Final Payback. It's always hard for me to fully place Greico, because the name evokes memories of his 80s glory, yet films like these remind just how far he's dropped. I guess everyone's gotta eat, but I get the sense that in each of these poorly made DTV stinkers he doesn't quite feel right: like he's playing back the 80s in his mind and wondering how he fell so far. This wasn't the way his career was supposed to go, and he can only hope another Tarentino will resurrect his career the way Travolta's was in Pulp Fiction. John, not Sam.



Ice-T's popping up rather frequently here at the DTVC. This will be the sixth film reviewed that he was in, making him tied for second with Norbert Weisser behind Daniel Bernhardt for the most movies of a non-Hall of Famer. Looking at the films lined up for future review, there's a good shot he can catch him soon. That begs the question: why isn't he in the DTVC Hall of Fame? The reality is it's a personal taste thing with some of the committee. He's kind of in that C. Thomas Howell area, where the resume's there, but a lot of people just don't like him. I must say he's growing on me. He was cool in the small amount he's in this film. Other than a part when he's slicing up his own hand with a knife, he was great as a drug lord looking for money from the guy from Gremlins. With a good showing in Crazy Six as well, I'm looking forward to what's next from him.

Art Camacho directed this. I see his name in a fair number of all the bad movies I watch. I decided to finally look him up and found he's directed five films I've reviewed if you include this one (also Crooked aka Soft Target, Final Payback, Gangland, and X-treme Fighter). Not only that, but in his roles as fight choreographer, producer, stunt man, and bit part actor, he's been in countless others. For the time being I'm just going to tag the films he's directed and call it good. Maybe if I have the time I'll go through the others and tag them as well. He's a pretty busy guy.



In terms of all the other stars, Angie Everhart's part made the least sense. She played O'Dell's sister. The deal was she had epilepsy, and the film treated it like a debilitating disorder where she couldn't care for herself, as if she was severely mentally handicapped. She wore these drab clothes in an attempt to make her less attractive, which, considering it was Angie Everhart, didn't work. In one freaky scene, the baddie, after attacking O'Dell, grabs Everhart, and she goes into convulsions. Eww. Then she's kidnapped by the same baddie, and her health issues suddenly play no part, probably for the convenience of the plot. She's treated pretty roughly. After she's rescued, instead of being allowed the comfort of her sister, she's taken away by the Dice Man so Greico and O'Dell can get it on. It was just weird.

I can't really see recommending this. It's got some sweet B,C, and D-list actors, but beyond that, it sucks. It's supposed to be a sexy suspense thriller, and it's really none of the three. I can't lie, I like really bad films, so I picked this up, but you've gotta be in that small percentile of people like me who take it too far and need a film like this to pull us back from the ledge. Your best bet is to stay away from it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0186454/

Final Payback (2001)

I saw this on my program guide a while back, and it looked promising. It had John Saxon, Martin Kove, Corbin Bernsen, Laura Herring, and last but not least, Richard Grieco. How could a movie with this kind of star power be bad, right? Oh, it can.

Final Payback stars Grieco as a cop framed for John Saxon's wife's murder. Saxon was his boss in the department, and Grieco'd been having an affair with his wife. Anyway, he knows he's been set up by the cops, so he has to clear his name. At the same time, Martin Kove, another higher up in the department, has hired two former thugs that he has under his thumb to assassinate Grieco. Also, Bernsen is running for mayor, and has a big news conference planned, and he needs Kove to have the Grieco situation dealt with to avoid bad publicity. Finally, Laura Herring plays the estranged girlfriend with a soft spot in her heart for the degenerate Grieco. For all her troubles as the only redeemable character in the film, she's killed by a bullet meant for Griec's.

This was a pretty depraved movie. It was trying very hard to be a suspenseful thriller with a harder, dirtier edge; but it just came off blah. If the basic premise is pretty much a Hallmark family mystery, adding gore and other bad stuff doesn't make it not that, it's just means it has no identity. Or worse, it's just plain disturbing.



The Laura Herring death may have been the worst. One thing I've always been annoyed with in bad action, horror, sci-fi, etc., is the propensity for the film makers to kill off people who go out of their way to help the hero. I'm just not sure why this makes me root for the hero, when he pawns off his life risking tasks on others. Here I was even more frustrated, because Grieco was so insistent on Herring helping him. It wasn't like she offered a hand, and then was offed; Grieco was fully responsible for her dying.

John Saxon played the same character he's played in Mitchell and the first Nightmare on Elm Street. The problem here, is there's none of that great Johnny Mathias shooting type of Saxon that would've made him cool. He wasn't pulling Gunderoos out of drawers, or trapping people with ceder lattice. He didn't even try to confuse Grieco with an over complicated business deal to buy him off while wielding a Slim Jim. It was just a waste.

Grieco has amassed a fairly respectable resume of DTV movies. I wonder if when filming 21 Jumpstreet he thought he'd have a better, or at least as good of, a career a Johnny Depp. I guess things don't always work out the way we planned them, so while Depp is making horrible films like Sleepy Hollow, From Hell, and Secret Window, Grieco's making this. I guess the only difference is the amount of zeros after the paycheck, which I would imagine is a huge difference.



I was trying to think of what was good in this. I'm drawing a blank. Martin Kove was Martin Kove, which is great if you're watching Karate Kid, but it's not enough to sell this bad boy. Corbin Bernsen is barely in this, and even if he was, would it matter that much? As far as I can tell, he was only great in that Seinfeld episode where he met George at the Tonight Show, and even there, George did all the work. I wouldn't even watch this for the Grieco factor, because he's all gross and degenerate-like: remember, this is supposed to be a Hallmark movie with an edge.

Don't be lured into this sack-of-asscrack. If you see it at your video store or on your program guide, and you see all the great actors listed, remember this review and run the other way. Let me spare you the pain I endured. This is hardcore bad, and should only be viewed by real masochists.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0223284/