Star Knight (1985)

In the endless search for more Klaus Kinski films, I found this bad boy. Also listed among the stars is Scorsese and Tarantino mainstay Harvey Keitel. Kinski paired with Winston The Wolf? This had greatness written all over it, and I didn't hesitate to pull the trigger when I saw it on Amazon.

Star Knight is a Spanish sci-fi/fantasy film involving an alien visiting a medieval Spanish manor. The lord's daughter finds the ship while swimming naked one night, and falls in love with the one alien aboard, a man who looks like the lead singer of any 80s New Wave band. Kinski plays a mystic employed by the lord from time to time to help him out, and he talks to the daughter upon her return. While everyone in town believes the ship is a dragon, and the alien a warrior of evil riding it, Kinski and the daughter know better. Enter Keitel as a swordsman looking to become a knight and also looking to marry the lord's daughter. He promises to slay the dragon and kill the alien controlling it. He and the local priest give it a go, and hilarity ensues. They take the ship from the alien, and accidentally fly it into space, while the alien stays home and marries the lord's daughter.



This movie is remarkably horrible. This was like MST3K bad. Think Deathstalkers and the Warriors From Hell, only add in Keitel and Kinski, which makes it all the better. This passed the true test of a great bad movie, when it entertained people who usually don't like to watch the crap that I do. There was just no way you couldn't find this funny.

Kinski was Kinski in this. He's in it slightly more than in The Creature, so I'd say it's worth a look if you're a fan of his. He lives up to his standing as a card carrying DTVC Hall of Famer, especially in the way he wears his ridiculous outfits. We spent the movie trying to guess how much he made, what demands he had for the production, and how he might have gotten along with Keitel. His name was top billing, so I have to assume that that was a stipulation on his participation. I must say, he's pretty tame in this, though. No Cobra Verde style freak outs, so in that sense, it was a little disappointing. Overall, a Kinski-esque effort.



Keitel was a whole other story. Anyone who's ever seen Last Temptation of Christ remembers his role as Judas, where he kept his New York accent. In that role, it just seemed to work, and it was one of the more inspired decisions Scorsese made in making that movie, at least for me. In this, he also retains the New York accent, but speaks in this Shakespearian tongue that sounds hilarious. Everytime he had a line, he elicited laughs. "Thow haath fohrsaken me!"

Being a Spanish movie, the Spanish director and Spanish writer included an ode Spain's greatest literary figure, Cervantes, with a Don Quixote like character called the Green Knight. I think we were supposed to juxtapose his genuine chivalry with Keitel's self-interested brand. I dug it. It was especially cool when the alien donned his gear to fight Keitel at the end. The whole thing was a touch of class in a movie that desperately needed it and more.



The inside of the alien's ship looked like something out of The Dark Crystal or Krull, both movies I'd think a film maker wouldn't want to have his film in the same sentence as, or even worse, be accused of ripping off. From the outside, the ship reminded me of Close Encounters. I was worried Richard Dreyfuss might show up, and was thankfully spared that pain. Finally, when the ship left the Earth's atmosphere, for some reason it turned into an animated cat toy, you know the ones with the bell inside the wire cage ball. I know it's 1985, and technology wasn't the best, but someone had to think that looked worse than just continuing to use the toy model of the ship that we saw on Earth. I'm not complaining, because it was just another thing for us to find funny, just curious how that decision was made.

This movie is probably too poorly made to be worth buying for more than a buck or two. If you see it to rent, snatch it up immediately, because it's perfect for a bad movie night. It's the kind of thing MST3K would've made a great episode with, and now you and your friends have the opportunity to see what you can do with it. My friends and I are big Kinski fans, and on that score, I'd recommend seeing too.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088870/

Ticker (2001)

This movie had Must Get written all over it: directed by Albert Pyun, starring Steven Seagal and Tom Sizemore, and Dennis Hopper listed as the bad guy. Considering Seagal and Pyun were both inducted into the DTVC Hall of Fame at the same time, I thought it would be sweet to review a film that had both of them. This is a dream bad movie lover pairing.

Ticker has Sizemore as a cop who, with his partner, rapper Nas, stumble upon Dennis Hopper, Jaime Pressley, and two Pyun mainstays, unloading some explosives. Nas bites it, and Sizemore's out for revenge. He calls on Seagal, who runs the bomb squad, to get help in tracking Hopper and his boys. At the same time, Pressley's in the can after the Nas killing, and Hopper wants her out, and he'll blow up a lot of stuff until the cops release her. Can Seagal and Sizemore track Hopper down before it's too late?

This movie was off the chain. The sheer volume of recognizable actors alone made it a hit for me. The action was mediocre, with Seagal barely flexing his martial arts muscles, and the explosions being a tad on the silly side. There's a scene where Hopper and Pressley are riding in a car, and out the window we can see a horribly obvious green screen effect. I think Pyun spent all his money on the cast, and I'm okay with that. The more great actors the better, as I always say.



The list of stars is pretty long. You got the obvious Seagal, Sizemore, and Hopper. Then Pressley, Nas, TLC's Chilli, and the guy who played Waingro in Heat. There's also the guy who played MC Hammer in his VH-1 bio-pic, the FBI guy from Navy NCIS, and the bad guy from The Mask, Peter Greene. That doesn't even count the Pyun mainstays like Norbert Weisser (the android who gets his head knocked around in Omega Doom), Michael Halsey (the hero, so-to-speak, in Mean Guns), and cameos by Ice-T and Vincent Klyn (the latter uncredited, though he was listed as an associate producer). I'm sure a more discerning viewer may be able to pick up on a few I missed.

Seagal was pretty good as a co-main character with Sizemore. They never explain why he knows martial arts as a bomb specialist, we just see him at the end of the film dispatching baddies. I think that's better than making up some ludicrous explanation and wasting our time like some movies do, when I'm sure most viewers are cool with Seagal using martial arts, even if it may not fit his character. In one scene, when he's defusing a bomb, he wears these sweet grandfather glasses. It was like he got them off the rack at a drug store. He looked like my dad trying to read a phone book more than an action hero racing against the clock to prevent a deadly catastrophe. At the end of the movie, Sizemore needs him to talk him through another bomb defusal, and Seagal spends about 75% of the countdown giving Sizemore a life lesson on dealing with stress. We were all like: "Jesus, just tell him how to stop the bomb!"



I didn't know what to make of Sizemore in this. His acting skills are head and shoulders above everyone else, including Hopper. It was like watching David Beckham play soccer on the same pitch as MLS players: the difference in talent was that palpable. I liked seeing him on the screen at the same time as Seagal, because Seagal seemed to understand just how good Sizemore is, and as opposed to the other actors, he didn't try to act at his level, andlook dumb in the process. Together they made the kind of buddy picture Rush Hour thinks it has, and it'd be cool if Pyun could maybe bring them together for another go 'round.

Dennis Hopper is ridiculous in this. For a chunk of the film he sports a bad Irish accent. I'm not sure if his character was faking it, or was supposed to have it, but it was silly all the same. There were times when he lost it, which left us even more perplexed. It was never clear if his dropping the accent was his character affecting an American one, or his character speaking in his real voice, or Hopper just being lazy. It may have been all of the above. Just the same, we got what we'd expect from Hopper playing a baddie: he definitely didn't mail it in. Like Sizemore, his struggles off the set have hurt his career, but been a bonus for us bad movie honks, because we get to see him in films like this.



There was one lapse in continuity in this movie that made zero sense to me. It took place in San Francisco, and Pyun made that very clear, yet all the cars had Illinois plates. I'm not sure I got why they did that. There was nothing San Fran specific that couldn't have been shifted to make the film take place in Chicago. I just can't figure out why the film went on with that glaring mistake in it.

One final note about Ticker. In the beginning, Pyun splices in some scenes from Dolph Lundgren's Sweepers. It was very Agent Red of them. I noticed that the hostage scene looked very similar to the one in Sweepers where they first find the stealth mine. My suspicions were confirmed after a quick check of the film on imdb. These are the kind of film making techniques that make me a proud fan of bad movies. Do they teach taking entire scenes from other movies in film school? Is there a class called FILM 405: The Art of Using Other People's Movies?

If the preceding wasn't enough of a give away, I think this film's fantastic. It's well worth the money spent on a rental. I would totally center a bad movie night around it, it'll definitely deliver. This may be Seagal's best DTV work, and I think that's saying a lot considering some of the gems out there.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0196158/

Sweepers (1998)

I bought this in a two-pack with The Peacekeeper. Together they cost a total of $10, and as far as I can tell, The Peacekeeper alone was worth more than that just for the part where they spell the country Chile Chili. That meant I was playing with the house's money with this bad boy.

Sweepers is about a land mine clearing specialist played by Dolph Lundgren, who crawls into a bottle of bad liquor after he sees his son die in Angola during a UNITA raid on his mine clearing efforts. In the meantime, a new stealth mine is found in the US, and it turns out it's being tested in the rebel warfare in Angola. The mine's creator is sent to Angola to find it, and she needs Dolph's help in dealing with it. Enter Bruce Payne as Dolph's old buddy and a doctor in a clinic helping Angola's sick. It doesn't take long before Bruce Payne becomes Bruce Payne, and shows his true colors as a bad guy. Luckily Dolph stops him, saves the girl (the mine's creator), and gets the mine off the streets.

This movie was intended to heighten awareness about the problem of land mines throughout the world. It's a noble notion, but unfortunately the film's kind of boring and not too good. On the other hand, I prefer the message that land mines are a global humanitarian crisis that needs attention, more than the conservative fear mongering I get from a Hunt for Eagle One or Second in Command.



The Dolph in this is all right. In one scene, he's fighting a couple guys in a ring situated in a bar. This is where the mine's creator and Dolph's eventual love interest first sees him. For some reason his hands are tied in front of him. I can't for the life of me figure out why any of it was in the film. There's definitely much better Dolph out there, but this isn't bad if you want something you haven't seen before or want something different.

Overall the action lags. There're long periods of inactivity, and where there is something, it's not always that exciting. For a film about land mines, the explosions are a tad on the perfunctory side. Also, the bad guys are weak, especially this South African dude with a big beard who's supposed to be menacing, but just looks like a reject from The Red Green Show.

It takes over an hour before we find out Bruce Payne is a bad guy. I think that's a record for a Bruce Payne film. Anyone who's seen any amount of bad movies would know the moment he or she sees Bruce Payne's name on the box that he'll be a baddie eventually, so I thought it was interesting that this film kept up with the charade for so long. Another issue with their use of Bruce Payne was his bad Brooklyn accent. Why did they need this? As a character, no one would've had any issue with him using his own voice. The movie took place in Angola, so a doctor working in a clinic could as easily have been from England as he could've been from NYC. Maybe they intended to have the character be from Brooklyn, hired Bruce Payne, then didn't have the heart to tell him how ridiculous the accent sounded. Either way, it tarnished some of the Payne factor for me.



The doctor angle of Bruce Payne's character troubled me too. I understand that it was kind of a conflict of interests that he was trafficking land mines while running a clinic, but at the same time, he was still saving lives, and doing it for no money. What kind of a front is that for a land mine trafficking operation? Working in a free clinic in Africa must be very stressful and involving. Where did he find the time to mastermind this scheme while treating women and children for malaria and AIDS?

One of the better lines in the film came when the land mine's creator went to Dolph for help, and he was less than willing. She asked him: "Have you always been this much of an asshole, or did you take lessons?" My buddy once asked his dad a similar question, only instead of "lessons", he said "night courses". It's a subtle difference, but I like the latter version better. If one takes "lessons", the idea is that he or she is adding a hobby or something: swimming lessons, karate lessons, tuba lessons. On the other hand, "night courses" implies an attempt to make a better life, or a career change: night courses to be a paralegal, or to get that masters in teaching. It's like the person is aspiring to be an asshole.



The woman in this is hot in a different way from other bad action movie vixens. She's like the attractive bohemian woman behind the counter at the local organic food store, who's like way out of my league, and a little old for me. I can see her in like a cheap yet sophisticated tank top with some kind of Indian inspired long peasant skirt. I'd know going in I had no chance with her, but still would want to impress her with my purchases, and be totally tongue tied when she'd mention her husband liked the same kind of tea that I bought, and I'd say something moronic like "Yeah, it's really GREAT," then be kicking myself about it later. I'm not sure how that works in a movie like this. I can't see the burly South African guy and Bruce Payne having her tied to a pipe like she was in this, grilling her about the items in her market. "I thought you said this tea was Fair Trade!" "Go to hell!" Slap!

If you're looking for good Dolph, you may like this. There are probably like ten or fifteen you'll want to watch first, so I'd say only watch this if you're a long time Dolph fan, which would probably mean that you've already heard of this and don't need my review to tell what it's like. I'm not sure I'd have this at a gathering of a bunch of people for a bad movie night, because it is kind of boring. Maybe screen it first to see what your friends'll think.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120851/

Druids aka Vercingetorix (2001)

I'd heard big things about this movie for a while before I actually watched it. It was supposed to be absolutely hilarious. How could it not be: Lambert in a movie about Druids with hair like that? This one had to be a lock.

Druids is actually called Vercingetorix, and is a bio-pic about the famous leader of Gaul who fought Julius Caesar. Lambert plays the eponymous hero, a great German actor plays Caesar, and Ingmar Bergman mainstay Max von Sydow plays an actual Druid. The movie starts with Lambert as a young boy seeing his father murdered as clansmen looked to consolidate power. He returns later to take the throne of power that was rightfully his. He first leads his men in battle with the Romans, only to learn this isn't the way to do it. He does his best to fight off Caesar, but we learn it's the people under him that make mistakes that lead to his downfall and the eventual Roman victory.



This actually isn't that bad as a bio-pic. Maybe it's not the most accurate historically, but as a movie it's better than a lot of Lambert's other films. I went into it thinking I was getting a silly medieval tale with witches and magic and whatnot. I'm not sure if the distributors here in the US were afraid of marketing a film about Vercingetorix with Lambert as the lead role, so they overhauled the title and targeted the Dungeons and Dragons demographic, but it was a bad move, and more so, and insult to the intellect of us bad movie watchers. Okay, maybe not so much the second part.



Lambert's not bad in this. A friend of mine who's a history buff hated his hair, but I'm not so sure that's that big of a deal. He was better in this as the hero of Gaul than he was as a Eurotrash Beowulf. I think the thing to do now would be to cast him as Franklin Pierce in a film about the life of the Doughface fourteenth president. I bet he could pull it off. I'm not saying he's a Southern sympathizer, I'm just saying he'd make a good Franklin Pierce.

The guy who played Julius Caesar was the man. I don't think I've ever seen a better one. His name's Klaus Maria Brandauer. It's rare to find a gem like that when looking for a bad Lambert movie. As far as I can tell from his imdb bio, he mostly works in Germany. I think that's good, because he'd probably be pigeonholed as a bad guy in horrible Nicolas Cage films if he hung out in Hollywood too much. Germans are just too easy to use as evil masterminds.



Max von Sydow's in this in a few scenes. I was looking through the other films I've reviewed on here, and I believe he may have the most quality resume. His work with Bergman alone speaks for itself. It's amazing that a man who's done The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, and Through a Glass Darkly, just to name three, has also done Judge Dredd and Rush Hour 3. According to imdb, he did a film that hasn't made it to the US yet called Final Inquiry, and it has fellow stellar Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren in it too. Word on the street is it'll be released in the US in February of 2008. The DTVC will keep you posted.

I don't know what to do about recommending this. If you and your friends can make fun of anything, give it a shot. Otherwise, if you're looking for something bad to laugh at, this isn't it. The US or Canadian distributors falsely packaged this not-so-bad bio-pic as a cheesy medieval tale of magic and sorcery. Just remember when you rent it that it's not about Druids, but Vercingetorix, and it's a pretty good movie.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0199481/

The Hard Corps (2006)

I saw this in the video store and rented it solely for the Van Damme factor. Well, that and Vivica A. Fox was in it, and I was kind of surprised to see she'd fallen on such bad times. I mean, they usually just get random hot chicks with no acting portfolio to play Van Damme's love interest, how did they pull off Vivica A. Fox, right?

The Hard Corps is about some former boxer who's trying to fix his community with expensive housing developments. He's gotten on a gangstah rap record mogul's bad side, and when the dude gets out of jail, he puts a hit on the boxer. Vivica A. Fox is the boxer's sister, and she figures their regular security detail ain't enough. They call in some guy who's friends with Van Damme. Van Damme is an Iraq War vet with some post-traumatic stress issues. All that really means is he has flash backs whenever it's convenient to the plot. Anyway, Van Damme protects the boxer, kills the rap mogul, and makes out with Vivica A. Fox. Good Deal.



This movie is really rough. There isn't anything memorable about it. I think there may be some kind of message about hip hop being bad for the black community, or about the way some African Americans give back when they become successful, while others are a cancer. If there was, the film didn't do a great job conveying it, and it smacked to me as more of a white Republican treatise on good versus bad "Negroes" in American society. It was hard to watch either way.

The Van Damm-age is pretty lame too. He flexes his martial arts here and there, but it's weak. He has it out with the boxer, and I was expecting a solid fight, a la Kiss of the Dragon with Jet Li, but instead I got a bad imitation of the Piper fight scene in They Live with his buddy when he's trying to get him to put on the glasses-- only the Van Damm one was without the humor. This isn't as bad as or In Hell or Second in Command, but it's not anywhere near the kind of fun bad action Derailed or The Order was. I hope Van Damme picks it up and does a few solid Die Hard rip-offs instead of these boring, low-on-action, movies-with-a-bad-message. They just don't work, and I think they alienate his target audience: us bad movie honks.



Vivica A. Fox is hot in this, naturally. She's over forty, and not much younger than Van Damme, which is even more impressive. As an actress, she does a poor job breathing life into this atrocious script, but she really nails it in pretending to be attracted to Van Damme. Either that, or she actually digs him, which I think is a stretch. The make out scene at the very end was tough to watch. You could tell Van Damme was really looking forward to it. There's a sense whenever he hooks up with hot chicks like that in his movies that he's giving us this "What do you think of that guys? Don't you wish you were me? I'm awesome." He needs to realize that none of us wish we were ridiculous.

There was a guy who played Van Damme's old buddy that was played by a poor man's Daniel Bernhardt. I thought this was the best. I did the math out: if Van Damme is now the poor man's Van Damme, that makes Daniel Bernhardt the guy who collects bottles from trash cans man's Van Damme. Now, with the poor man's Bernhardt, we have the Depression era hobo spitting the grounds out of his coffee and hopping trains man's Van Damme. And he's in the same movie as Van Damme, which had to be interesting for him. The obvious question is why not get Bernhardt himself and skip a step. I think it has to do with the Timecop phenomenon. If an actor and the poor man's version of him inhabit the same space, it could be bad.



This movie's boring as all get-out. It's not worth renting or buying or spending any money on whatsoever. Maybe if it's on USA or something, watch it passively while doing something else, but even then I'd have to say it's a no go.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462329/

Highlander: The Source (2007)

As much as I love bad movies, I also love syndicated action shows. Renegade, Hercules, BeastMaster, and especially Highlander. I got all the episodes on DVD. Adrian Paul as Duncan MacLeod is pretty much the man as far as I can tell, and just as the series was getting stale around the third season, they added in the equally cool Peter Wingfield as Methos. When I heard they were making a new movie, I was stoked. When it suddenly premiered on Sci-fi one Saturday night, I was more than pleasantly surprised. When I watched it... a whole 'nother story...

Highlander: The Source is the fifth Highlander movie, and the second with Adrian Paul. I couldn't fully discern from the poorly developed script, but I think it takes place in Eastern Europe in the future. But it's not too far in the future, because Joe Dawson, who isn't immortal, is still alive. Anyway, times have gotten so bad that the planets are huge and visible in the night sky and their gravitational pull has no effect even when they're that close. Methos and some of the other boys think it's The Source, some kind of mythical not-so-mythical place from which Immortals came. Duncan's been kind of crabby lately because his woman ditched him because he can't have kids, but he comes across Joe Dawson who tells him he's gotta join Methos in looking for The Source. They're also chased by the Guardian, who's played by Mr. Sinister from the X-Men comics. In the end, they find The Source in the woods in Europe, Duncan fights the Guardian, and learns that the "There Can Be Only One" means he can have a kid.



As a fan of Highlander, this was a huge disappointment. There were story arcs during the TV series that blew this movie away. I watched this with some people who weren't Highlander fans, and they just thought it sucked. For days afterwards, we were asking each other: "Wow, what the hell was going on in that Highlander movie?" It may have been worse than Highlander 2: The Quickening. There, I said it.

I wish I had a "What was cool" section, but I really don't. There wasn't any great sword fights, no nicely choreographed martial arts, and no well-done period flashbacks. In fact, there weren't any flashbacks at all. The whole concept for this movie was just marinated and sauteed in wrong sauce. Someone needed to be a man and step in during the film making process and halt this production. From conception to execution, this movie was a disaster.



The bad guy, The Guardian, was supposed to be cool I guess. He looked like Mr. Sinister, and he'd shoot around the screen really fast. The problem was the effect that made him shoot around the screen looked like ten kinds of lame. This is especially distressing, when you consider that the TV show The Flash did a much better job depicting someone going really fast, and that show predated Highlander: The Series even. The only cool thing the bad guy did was sing Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever?" As far as Highlander villains go, he was no Kalus, no Xavier St. Cloud (played by Fine Young Cannibals' Roland Gift), no Bruce Payne-- hell, he wasn't even as good as Rowdy Roddy Piper and his one episode as a baddie. What a waste.

Now I know when examining a movie about people who can magically live forever I shouldn't be dwelling on issues like physics, but it was ridiculous how close planets like Jupiter and Neptune were to Earth. They were so visible in our sky that they were bigger than the moon. I guess what they're saying is The Source can manipulate gravity, but I don't know. It just looked so silly. This was another instance where someone needed to sit the director or whomever down and have a little talk. This is something I'd expect from an abhorrently bad sci-fi movie, not a quasi-respected franchise like this. And what's worse was how indicative it was of the rest of film. Just stupid.



Adrian Paul and Peter Wingfield were themselves in this, which was cool, but they had so little to work with it didn't matter. This was so bad they must've had the same feeling in the pit of their stomachs that LeVar Burton and Brent Spiner do when the shoot scenes for Star Trek movies wearing an air filter and white speckled face paint respectively. This material was equally silly. With characters as cool as MacLeod and Methos, you've got so many possibilities, it's hard to really screw up. But this was botched so badly. It was like Van De Velde on the 18th for the British Open. Maybe worse.

As far as I know, you can't rent this or buy it yet. It was released in Europe, but here you can only catch it on Sci-Fi for the time being. That's good, because that allows people to know what they're getting into with very little risk. The only thing you have to lose is two hours of your life, or in my case, 100 minutes after I fast forwarded all the commercials. If you're a Highlander fan like me, this is a huge disappointment. If you're not a Highlander fan, this just plain sucks.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299981/

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/