Bad Girls from Mars (1990)

I saw that this was on Instant, was directed by schlock auteur Fred Olen Ray, and looked like a fun time, so I figured why not make it happen.  Also, clocking in at 81 minutes doesn't hurt either.  Let's see then if I made the right choice.  Also, our friend Mitch at The Video Vacuum made this happen, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Bad Girls from Mars is about the making of a D film of the same name that has been beset by tragedy after tragedy.  It seems its leading ladies can't stop getting themselves murdered.  This isn't the worst thing for the film's producers, who stand to make a killing off the insurance if it's not made ("Springtime for Hitler" it's not), but they decide to take one last chance and hire a notorious madame who just published her tell-all book as their fifth lead.  The film's director can't handle all this stress, but when the murderer starts targeting him too, he's reaching his breaking point.  Will he be able to take enough Alka Seltzer and JD cocktails to keep himself sane?



This is really fun.  A USA Up All Nite style classic, complete with tons of boob shots that would've led to a lot of awkward edits in the cable TV version.  Ray does a great job of handling the spoof aspect in a way that doesn't become too gimmicky, which is hard with this kind of movie.  In a way it kind of feels like a Godard French New Wave film, in that it was a comedic commentary on the D industry the way Godard's films were a commentary on the then mainstream Hollywood industry-- the main difference being, where Godard would've had Jean-Pierre Leaud reading a socialist diatribe, Ray had one of his female stars showing her tits.  This is definitely what you come to a 90s sex romp for, and Ray delivers.

With someone like Fred Olen Ray, who has such a prodigious directing bio, there are bound to be some misses along the way, and it's possible because he needs to pump out so many over a short period of time, more of them end up misses to him than he'd like because he doesn't get the time or the resources to make it the way he wants.  It's good then when we get something like this, or Dinosaur Island, where we can showcase one of his hits, and what's funny about this one is that, in spoofing the D movie industry, he gives us an idea of how hard it is for him to make the movie he wants; but he does it in a way that's still funny and entertaining, and not whining, which is great for us in the audience.  When you think of that great USA Up All Nite aesthetic, no one does it like Ray, and this film is a great example of that.



After Tom Sizemore's pouring beer on his cereal in Point Break, this scene of the director mixing his Alka Seltzer with Jack Daniels is the all-time best degenerate alcoholic food moment in movie history.  Once I saw it, I knew I couldn't not talk about it.  I think when he actually drank it it was like cream soda or something, but still, the effect was there.  In my last post for Wicked, you may remember I mentioned a high school science teacher who was fired for giving another class non-alcoholic champagne.  Here's another great story about him.  One day that year the weatherman predicted a huge snow storm, and our teacher apparently banked on that happening and drank the lights out the night before.  Of course, even if this is the southern tip of Maine we're talking about, it's still Maine, and it still needs to be a massive snow storm to get school called, and that storm wasn't enough.  So he came into class with a hangover, and his lesson for the day was to show us how Alka Seltzer worked.  I'm not kidding.

There are plenty of other people in this.  The great Edy Williams plays the madame, and she seems to just go with all of it, whether she's changing in the back of a car, or telling the director she has a thing for men covered in garbage.  Speaking of the director, he's played by Oliver Darrow, and he hasn't been in much else.  That's too bad, because he was really funny here.  Fred Olen Ray mainstay Jay Richardson is in this as the overbearing obnoxious actor who only cares about his career.  I think he's given license to be as goofy as he wants here, and he definitely wants.  B horror and sci-fi great Brinke Stevens plays the costume girl and Richardson's woman.  She has almost 150 credits on imdb, of which almost all are DTV, and this is the first film of hers we've ever done, after well over 900 posts.  I have no idea how that happened, but it did.  Finally, Jefferey Culver played the producer.  I couldn't figure out who he looked like.  There were definitely some heavy notes of Jerry Orbach, a hint of the guy who played Bookman on Seinfeld, perhaps a dash of any former Murder She Wrote guest, and a blend of both Van Dyke brothers.



One thing you gotta love about watching any film is the director cameo, and Ray has two in this, one here as a guy robbing a liquor store, and later as a member of the crew tossing out scenes from the script-- literally throwing the pages out.  This one here as the liquor store robber looked like it was almost entirely improvised, or at the very least, not rehearsed.  I would've given you a shot of Ray without the bandanna over his face, but by the time he pulls it down, a topless Edy Williams shows up, and we can't show that if we want to keep oue blog without one of those parental warnings on it.

But hey, the movie's on Instant, so you can go there and see all the boobs you want.  Beyond the boobs, this is also a pretty funny and entertaining movie.  Fred Olen Ray delivers with a USA Up All Nite style classic, and it's well worth checking out.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101399/

Wicked (1998)

When I mentioned the DTVC to my girlfriend, she suggested I check this one out.  I was instantly intrigued by the idea of doing a Julia Stiles flick, plus it has DTVC favorite Michael Park as the detective.  I recognized a couple other names too, in particular Patrick Muldoon.  Often that's all I need anyway to get something on the blog, but it didn't hurt that she was requesting it-- yes, I guess that's the key to getting me to review your request, you have to be my girlfriend.  Sorry she beat you to it.

Wicked is about a family living in a gated community in California.  The oldest daughter, Julia Stiles, doesn't get along with the mother, and has a thing for the father.  This works out for her when the mother is murdered.  While detective Michael Parks is looking for the culprit, Stiles is busy filling her dearly departed mother's shoes, with the hopes of becoming her father's new wife.  This isn't exactly working out for either the father or her younger sister, and when he brings a new wife home, tensions rise.  What will Stiles do to get the family life back that she wants?



This is definitely a fun one in the vein of the Lifetime Original.  I mean, don't get me wrong, it's bad, whether it's the wannabe Hitchcockian direction that feels more TV movie thriller, or the story that devolves into something unrecognizable by the end, or just the sheer silliness of seeing Julia Stiles as a young girl trying to be her mom; but it's fun too.  Also, Stiles brings another element to the proceedings, because she is so good.  She turns the silly craziness of her character into an almost chilling deviousness, often just with the look on her face, so one can see in this film that she was going somewhere.  The rest of the cast, a mix of greats like Michael Parks and soap/Lifetime mainstays like Muldoon and William R. Moses, who played the dad, make this a great trash time waster, and sometimes that's all you need from a movie like this.

Julia Stiles is definitely the driving force of this film, and you can tell that, even then, she was a cut above everyone else other than maybe Parks.  I don't know if this is one she puts on the top of her CV, especially when you look at her imdb bio and see that a year later 10 Things I Hate About You blew up, followed by Save the Last Dance a couple years after that.  She's sort of fallen out of big Hollywood lead parts now, I think because they didn't know what to do with her once she couldn't play teens anymore; but to see her in a DTV Lifetime flick before she became big is a lot of fun.  The novelty is definitely worth it.



One of the failures of the writing in this film was the way they utilized Michael Parks's detective.  He was as good as you'd expect, and he comes across early on as that gumshoe who's going to figure this thing out just when the culprits think they're going to get away with it.  This never really happened though, and in fact, he acts against character at the end, giving the film an unresolved quality that felt like a cop out.  The thing that makes these Noir-ish suspense yarns is the detective, and when you have a guy like Parks, why not lean on him?  Also, when you have an agent in your story like the detective, it's like you have an easy element who can resolve the story for you, and to not use that agent properly gives the film an inorganic quality that makes the whole thing not work.  Too bad, but still, for fans of Michael Parks, he's a lot of fun.

Among the other stars, the one that we've seen on here before is Patrick Muldoon, who you may remember getting his ass kicked by Richard Norton in Rage and Honor II.  He plays the derelict neighbor that's shagging the wife before she's offed, making him Parks's prime suspect.  One of my favorites was William R. Moses, who played the dad, and who is a Lifetime Movie mainstay and does tons of TV work too.  It was so weird hearing him swear, and I wonder if he was excited to be able to do that too, like "fuck TV man!"  The mom was played by Chelsea Field, who played Teela in Masters of the Universe, but will be better known to most of you as the Western Airlines flight attendant whom Schwarzenegger tells "don't disturb my friend, he's dead tired" in Commando.  Nothing as cool as that for her here, though she was a great character and it was too bad she was killed off so soon.  Finally, the younger sister was played by Vanessa Zima, who I remembered from Ulee's Gold.  Her last name is great too, reminding me of that alcoholic drink with the same name from the 90s.  Our freshman science teacher asked us if we'd tried it before, and we were like "dude, we're 14!"  Surprise surprise, he was fired at the end of the year for giving kids in another class non-alcoholic champagne, which I guess still has alcohol in it.



Part of the tension of this film is supposed to come with us, the audience, seeing Stiles as a young girl making moves on her father.  Now, the father thing was definitely an issue, but the age wasn't, because she and I are roughly the same age.  I mean, her outfits and whatnot are exactly what girls in my school wore, so I couldn't help transporting myself back to 1998 with them, and by doing that, making myself 19 again.  Where the film did make its money in this respect though came in her interactions with Patrick Muldoon, those definitely made me feel uncomfortable.  It's one of the odd things about movies though, the audience perception has a lot to do with how it comes off, and me not being able to divorce the fact that Stiles is my age from who her character was affected how I perceived the film.

Okay, let's wrap this up.  As far as I know, this is only available on used DVD or VHS.  I know I got it used on DVD, and it was really cheap.  I'm not sure you should go out of your way to track it down, but if you see it in a bargain bin for a buck or two, it's worth it.  As far as my girlfriend's knack for picking DTVC films: she's one for one right now, so we'll see if she retires one for one, or makes some future requests.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120088/

Stranded (2013)

This is one that our friends across the pond had the jump on us on by about two months before we got it here, and for me, having seen some of Christian Slater's other DTV work and enjoyed it, I was excited to see what it was all about.  The problem was, after it was released, it was stuck in Long Wait limbo in my DVD queue.  Finally we got it, so let's see if it was worth the wait.  Also, our buddy Fred, The Ex-Ninja looked at this one, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Stranded is about a moon base that does some kind of mechanized mining operation supervised by a crew of four people.  When the base is bombarded by a meteor shower, vital life support systems are damaged, and the crew is forced to wait while a rescue shuttle may or may not arrive.  At the same time, a spore has been discovered on one of the rocks.  I can't imagine that spore would be trouble at all though...



This isn't horrible by any stretch.  It's well shot, well acted, the sets looked nice, etc.  The thing I'm left with though is "and what?"  We've seen this movie done so many times, and this one doesn't really add anything unique.  Is that the worst thing ever?  I guess kind of?  I don't know.  I think on some levels it wanted to be that combination of Solaris (the Tarkovsky version, of course) and Alien or The Thing, but it never quite got there for me.  It's the kind of movie that if it ends up on Instant, or cable, or what have you, it's a fun way to kill 90 minutes, but I don't know if beyond Christian Slater it's anything you need to go out of your way for.

Slater is solid here again.  It's an odd part though, because he's the lead, but he's not always the focal point of the film until the end.  Other characters are affected by the spore, and we get their experience more, while Slater pops in and out to check up on things.  It's an odd construct when you think about: a film in a small environment with only four characters, and somehow we lose one for periods of it, and that one is the film's main star.  But Slater delivers that same smooth, consistent, almost effortless performance we've come to expect, and even with a film like this that would otherwise have been a skip for me, he elevates it to something else and makes it watchable and review-worthy.  Can't wait to see what he does next.



This movie was directed by Roger Christian.  If you don't know, he won an Oscar for his set decoration along with three other people for Star Wars, and was also nominated for the Oscar in the same category with three other people for Alien.  On the other hand, he won a Razzie as director of Battlefield Earth.  Ouch, though I don't really remember Battlefield Earth being poorly directed per se; but like in football where the quarterback gets all the glory in the win and the blame in a loss, the director has to wear it if his film is Battlefield Earth, fairly or unfairly.  This is much better of course, and while that isn't saying much, I imagine, especially when working with a small budget, that it's hard to pull off the film you want, and I think he put together a solid effort here, one that proves that Razzie was a blip in his career, not indicative of his overall work.

After Slater, I really liked Brendan Fehr as the base's doctor.  Really cool, and definitely made up for the times when Slater wasn't on-screen.  According to imdb he seems to do a lot of TV work, but hopefully we'll see him in more DTV flicks, maybe opposite Slater, because they were good together.  Then we had Amy Matysio as the crew member who first brings the spore on board.  We've seen her a couple times on here before, recently in the Kim Coates flick Ferocious, and in another Slater film, Dolan's Cadillac.  This was by far the biggest part we've seen her in though, and she wasn't bad.  Finally, we had Michael Therriault as the base engineer.  This is the first thing I've seen him in, and he was pretty good too, but I can't get too much into either his or Matysio's parts because I'll give away too much of the movie.



I had one major problem with this movie right from the start though, and while I suspended belief to some degree to get into it, it still affected how believable it was for me.  If we're making bases on the moon, why are we not making them more durable?  We know the moon has essentially no atmosphere, so rocks from space are going to impact what's there, unlike here where only the big ones hit and the rest are burnt up in our atmosphere before they hit.  So you'd think they'd plan better for something like the catastrophe that befell them at the beginning.  I understand that that would mean we'd have no movie, but if the movie hinges on something so unreasonable, isn't better to go back to the drawing board.

You can get this on the usual DVD suspects, Netflix, RedBox, etc.  As I said above, while this isn't horrible, I'm not sure it's remarkable enough either to go too far out of your way for it.  Again, you've seen this before, and it's really not bringing anything new to the table.  A solid cable or Instant time waster, so if it ends up on either of those outlets and you come across it, it might not be too bad.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2268573/

Road to Hell (2012)

Recently Albert Pyun sent me a link to screen his new film Road to Hell on YouTube.  The film is pretty much finished, and looking to be released by Lions Gate in the first quarter of 2014, so this screener was for us reviewers and whatnot to take a look at it for him to see if there were any glaring issues.  I asked him if he wanted me to write a review of it now, and he did, so here we are.  Let's see how it went.

Road to Hell is a sequel to Streets of Fire, with DTVC favorite Michael Paré reprising his role as Tom Cody.  He's headed to see his long lost love Ellen in Edge City, and finds himself on an isolated desert road.  This road he's on is Purgatory, and the Archangel Gabriel (played by Joei Fulco) is trying to save Cody's soul before the Devil can take it.  On the way, he encounters two spree killers: Caitlin and Ashley, dangerous women with their own demons.  Will he survive this meeting?  And if he does, will he find the redemption he seeks in Edge City?



I really liked this movie.  One of Pyun's best in my opinion, especially among his newer films.  It's bold and innovative, and his penchant for taking chances pays off here as well as I've ever seen it.  The film looks really nice, and he captures the liminal space aspect we want from a film taking place in purgatory.  Cynthia Curnan's story fits Albert's directing style organically, as does the score featuring longtime Pyun composer Anthony Riparetti and songs performed by The Roxy Gunn Project (with lead singer Roxy Gunn playing Cody's daughter).  And then there was Paré, who got a film worthy of one of his most iconic characters, and he nailed it completely.  It's like he never lost touch with that character after all these years, yet he still moved him forward to make him into the character Cynthia wrote for him.  On top of Paré, I really liked Joei Fulco as Gabriel, and Claire Kramer as Caitlin, plus Courtney Peldon as Ashley and Pyun mainstay Deborah Van Valkenburgh reprising her role as Cody's sister.  It's a little gory, so if you have a weak stomach you may want to be careful, but if you're looking for something different, and bloody, Road to Hell delivers.

 We've done almost all of Pyun's films here at the DTVC, and I'm not about to try to figure out where this one stands with ones like Brainsmasher or Nemesis, or really any others, because this one is so different.  I mean, I could recognize elements from films like Radioactive Dreams or Vicious Lips, and maybe the bloody, violent, dark nature of Road to Hell is what he ultimately wanted Cyborg to be; but really, what's there is Pyun's unique vision and desire to try new things and take risks, which is something you can see in a lot of his films.  And like those films, it doesn't always work-- like I thought his attempt to explore Ellen Dream's (Roxy Gunn) backstory in an interview with a local radio host didn't come off as natural, even though I liked that it had a rock n' roll feel like the rest of the film-- but more of his risks and instincts paid off here than didn't, and we were left with something that I found to be very entertaining, and a distinctly Pyun film experience.



When I told my girlfriend I was reviewing a film with Michael Paré in it, she told me that growing up she had a pin-up of him from her Teen Beat on her wall, maybe from Eddie and the Cruisers.  For the most part here at the DTVC, we've either done his DTV stuff from the 90s where he had lead parts, or his recent DTV work where he's often either the baddie or has a small cameo.  To see him here though, even as the lead in a picture that is very different from the usual action flick, was really great, and I think brought back some of that 80s heartthrob magic.  Between Pyun's direction, and Jim Hagopian and Michael Su's cinematography, they really leaned on Paré's face, and his more mature features that he has now lent themselves really well in crafting that Film Noir vibe Pyun was going for, but without him being the lead that he is, it wouldn't have come off, and he has that same leading man charisma that he had back then.  So while it's great to see him in anything, and those cameos and roles as baddies are fun, we need more films like this with him in the lead, and hopefully we'll get them.

In the lead up to this film, Pyun was telling us on his Facebook page about this new actress Joei Fulco he found and cast in this film and the upcoming Cyborg Nemesis.  I know from having seen a lot of his films that he has a great instinct for young talent, especially young women, and isn't afraid to lean on them in key scenes, so I was curious to see what he was talking about with Fulco.  I didn't have long to wait, because she starts the film off introducing us to the action, and he wasn't exaggerating about her talent.  This was a tough role he put on her, having to give us the backstory in a monologue at the beginning of the film, when all we want is some action to draw us in, she's doing it with just her voice and her face; but she did it, she read it almost like she was having a conversation with us, and it all completely worked.  If she doesn't pull that off, not only does Pyun risk us not being engaged with his film right from the start, but also the redemptive quality of Paré's Cody is totally lost on us.  Instead we're rooting for Cody because of Fulco's Gabriel, which sets the stage for the rest of the film to work.



I mentioned above that Pyun drew a lot from Film Noir, and another genre he drew from that we've seen him go to before is the 50s and 60s dangerous women exploitation film.  I've seen other film makers try to emulate this kind of Russ Meyer film too, and miss completely.  I think because Pyun has always gone deeper than just the sex aspect, and makes his women in these films fully rounded characters, which makes it work much better; and seeing that aspect in the characters of Caitlin and Ashley is a great example.  They aren't just wild women who take their clothes off, make-out, and kill, they have motivations for their actions, and as such when they interact with Cody things are more tense and less predictable.  It's touches like that in Pyun's films that I often enjoy no matter what, but when they work really well like they did here, it's so much better.

Fans of Streets of Fire will like the music, and many songs from the original are here.  The Roxy Gunn Project does some, with Roxy Gunn playing Ellen's daughter and performing them as the soundtrack to Cody's adventure, adding to the tone of Cody's redemptive quest.  They definitely had that 80s feel that the original film had, not to mention the outfits of the band performing at the end of the film.  It's interesting when you think of films Pyun did like Radioactive Dreams and Vicious Lips which were from that time and had some of the elements of Streets of Fire, to then feel like here I'm seeing him bring elements from those films into this was really cool.  Unfortunately, the late Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You" didn't make an appearance.  I guess you can't have everything.



No review of an Albert Pyun film would be complete without playing our favorite game: Name the Pyun Mainstay.  We'll start with the obvious one, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, who wasn't in this so much for being a Pyun mainstay as she was reprising her role from Streets of Fire, but she's still a mainstay and needs to be included.  She has a few scenes where she's interviewed by a police interrogator about her brother, plus a flashback scene, then comes in at the end to interact with Cody.  I think fans of the first film will enjoy seeing her here.  Speaking of the police interrogator, he's voiced by none other than Norbert Weisser.  We don't see him on-screen, just hear his voice, but it's him all right, and this makes 16 films of his that he's done with Pyun that we've reviewed here.  Finally, Scott Paulin also does some voice work, playing a man who drives Paré into Edge City.  Like Weisser, we never see him on screen.  Also, his character name is Brick Bardo, keeping up Pyun's tradition of having a character with that name in his films.

As I said above, it looks like this will be out in the first quarter of next year.  For updates on it you can follow Albert Pyun on Twitter @albertpyunfilms and like him on Facebook at Albert Pyun Movies.  The movie is very unique, but I think long time Pyun and Paré fans should definitely check it out, and really anyone looking for a different and compelling film experience.  I love it when film makers take chances, and Pyun always does that; but he also has a wealth of skill and experience as a director, and all of that comes together here and really works.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1253859/

Sharknado (2013)

When this first aired on SyFy and generated all that buzz on Twitter, you knew it was only a matter of time before I reviewed it, and the wait was really for me to finally get it on DVD.  That's the thing with The Asylum blowing up on SyFy, we at the DTVC have to wait for them to finally make it onto DVD now, whereas before we got first crack at them.  That's okay though, we're notorious for being late to the party anyway, but hopefully when we finally get there we add something to the festivities.  Speaking of friends who have already been here, we have Fred Dixon, the Ex-Ninja, Fred the Wolf at Full Moon Reviews, and Tars Tarkas.NET, so you can go and check out what they thought of this too.

Sharknado has the great Ian Ziering as Fin, a retired famous surfer who runs a beach side bar.  When a massive storm destroys it and threatens the rest of LA, he knows he needs to get to his ex wife and daughter in Beverly Hills to safety.  The ex wife is played by none other than Tara Reid.  In true Asylum style, this ain't no ordinary storm, as tons of sharks are washing up in the flood waters and tearing people apart.  But that's only the beginning, as tornadoes are popping up from the flood waters too, and it looks like they might be picking the sharks up with them.  Will Ziering and crew all make it out alive?



This movie is a lot of fun.  I should warn you that the actual Sharknado doesn't appear until near the end, so on some levels it's a Sharknado bait-and-switch, but everything else is The Asylum doing what The Asylum does right.  It's a good mix of cheese, send-ups of older films in the genre, homages to other greats, and some pretty sweet satire.  I love the references to Bad Taste and The Shining, which you can find on your own as you watch it.  There are probably some others you've seen too that I missed.  Ziering is great in the lead, and the supporting cast around him is great too.  Reid isn't in it as much, but I enjoyed her role as the mom of two teen kids in Beverly Hills, and she and Ziering were good together.  I also loved how The Asylum has reached a great balance between schlock silliness, and quality work, whether it's the special effects, or the high level of some of the humor.  The Ferris wheel rolling down the boardwalk looked great; and the scene where the waitress at Ziering's bar, played by Cassie Scerbo, relates how she got the shark bite scars on her leg is hilarious.  If you're like me and you've seen a ton of these, you might wonder what the fuss was about, because it's not better than some of The Asylum's best work; but it was a great moment for them to get some shine like that, and the movie is plenty of fun to boot.

It's amazing how far The Asylum has come in the six-plus years we've been doing the DTVC.  This is the 27th film of theirs we've reviewed, and what's happened is that we've gone from most being misses with the occasional hit, to now almost all being hits with very few misses.  We've also seen them score more and better acting talent, plus they have this contract with SyFy so that their DTV movies are often TV movies with a bigger audience.  I can't help but note too though the many times the Sharknado destroyed classic Hollywood landmarks, like the Hollywood sign or the outside of Mann's Chinese where the actor's hand prints are.  Is there a veiled message for us about how they feel about big Hollywood?  Either way, it's been fun to watch The Asylum's transformation, and I can't wait to see what they have for us next.



My man, Ian Ziering, aka Steve Sanders from 90210.  This is big for him, he's finally cast as Brandon Walsh, and he nails it.  Actually, it's more accurate to say that his character is a mix between Dylan McKay and Brandon Walsh, but either way, Ziering is no longer the supporting character, and it was nice to see him pull it off.  It's possible that because he was Steve Sanders for so long, not the Brandon or Dylan, that he could play this role that The Asylum had for him, which was a combination of the classic hero and a send-up of the classic hero, and play it so seamlessly.  He's both in on the joke and playing it straight at the same time, and without both, I think the film wouldn't have been as enjoyable.  As someone who loved him in 90210, it's great to see him top billed and do well at it.

We've done our share of shark attack films in our time at the DTVC, and I think this one is up there as one of the best.  Maybe not Cruel Jaws or Shark Attack 3, which I hold up as the standard, but I'd slot it in right below that.  One thing about this is that there are tons of sharks here, and they start killing immediately.  It's like a mix between the old insect swarm film of the 50s and the modern shark film, which is a unique take on it, but The Asylum makes it work.  And there all kinds of different ones, so it's like those Shark Attack fruit snacks we used to have in the 80s and 90s that I used to love getting for my lunch, I could be like "oh, there's a hammerhead!"  Man, those were so good, weren't they?



Look at who that is.  It's Cousin Oliver!  I know, can you believe it?  There has to be someone at The Asylum who loves The Brady Bunch, because we also saw Greg Brady, aka Barry Williams, in Bigfoot.  If you don't know his real name, it's Robbie Rist, and he only has a small role as a bus driver with a bus full of kids that Ziering rescues.  Then we had Tara Reid as Ziering's ex-wife.  She wasn't in this quite as much as the buzz made it sound, but I liked the idea of her as the Beverly Hills mom.  I think she'd be great in a role like that in a CW teen drama, like maybe with Ziering as her husband.  What a cool show that would be.  John Heard has a small role as a bar patron at Ziering's establishment, kind of just dirty old man humor, but he's good at it.  Baywatch alum Jaason Simmons plays Ziering's bud.  He'd be great in that capacity if the show I'm proposing with Reid and Ziering were a sitcom instead.  Finally, I mentioned Cassie Scerbo above.  She's like the next Jennifer Esposito, which I think wouldn't be a bad career for her-- in fact considering how young she's starting out, she may ultimately do Esposito better than Esposito.

Okay, let's wrap this up.  I don't know if this still airs on SyFy, but I'm sure it does.  If you don't want to wait, you can rent it on DVD at all the usual suspects.  The buzz is more for people who don't usually watch films like this, but considering you're here, it means this kind of thing is probably old hat for you, and if that's the case, then this is just a fun way to kill 90 minutes, which I think is all you're really asking for from The Asylum anyway.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2724064/

The Mark (2012)

My girlfriend and I were talking about my blog last week, and she asked if I ever did low-budget religious movies.  She's not religious herself, but said she likes to fall asleep to them.  Off the top of my head the only one I could remember doing was the Dolph Lundgren flick Final Inquiry, which was a religious film that I wasn't expecting to be religious.  Beyond that, I had trouble thinking of anyone in our neck of the blogosphere that ever did religious films.  I know The Deadly Dolls House of Horror Nonsense once covered Left Behind, but that was about it.  In fact, many of my fellow low-budget movie bloggers explicitly said they wouldn't do movies like this because they weren't their thing.  That was my stance too, more so because I didn't want the trouble that comes from reviewing a religious movie: people get their dander up and like to pick fights, and that's the last thing I need to deal with.  On the other hand, as I was talking about it with my girlfriend, I was reminded that DTVC Hall of Famer Gary Daniels had three religious films in the can that he shot in Thailand recently, and I was on the fence about looking at them.  Well, now we're going to try this one, and we'll see how it goes.  In this review I'm going to do my best to be respectful to everyone's beliefs, and also look at the film on its merits beyond its religious content, especially Daniels's performance.  Let's see how it went.

The Mark is about mercenary Craig Sheffer, a former army man who fought in Afghanistan, and a nonbeliever.  He's injected with a microchip against his will, and the company he works for sends him and Eric Roberts to Berlin for the G20 summit in order to show the chip off.  There's another guy though who wants that chip, and he hires mercenary Gary Daniels and his team to hijack the plane and get Sheffer.  Next thing you know there's explosions at 30,000 feet and then The Rapture happens and all hell breaks loose-- no pun intended.



I didn't care for this much.  First off, there was a fair amount of proselytizing.  I'm not complaining about that specifically, because I'm the one who came to this religious movie, it's not like the people who made it knocked on my door; but it did interrupt the flow of the film.  It was often inserted inorganically, which threw off the rhythm, especially in the early going.  Also, from a writing standpoint, we had some plot convenience theater, especially with Daniels's character who is knocked out when The Rapture happens, then is completely ignored until the very end of the movie.  I thought he was one of the chosen ones he was so absent.  Speaking of The Rapture, it was a good ending point for the film, but we still had 36 minutes of the film spinning its wheels before we got to the credits.  It was annoying, especially the whole thing with Sheffer trying to get into the cockpit.  We knew he was going to get in there, they only prolonged it to pad the film.  Finally, the special effects were Asylum bad, but with The Asylum, we know their films are meant to be fun and campy.  This movie was serious, so the bad special effects came off as crass and hokey.  For most of my audience who isn't religious-- and I think even for those who are-- there isn't much here beyond your classic unevenly written plane hijacking yarn; but because it has that massive religious element, I'd say it's a skip for anyone not interested in hearing that.

Gary Daniels though was really good here.  I was looking him up to see if he was born again or something, and the best I could find is that he's making films in Thailand right now, and that's where these were shot, so either the paycheck or the role enticed him.  I can see how the role though would've done it for him, because this isn't a bad baddie, and he makes the most of it.  He said in an interview I read that he's always looking for parts that do something for his career, and if I were a DTV film maker I'd cast him as a baddie in my next actioner, for sure.  Of course, I'd rather have him as the lead, but I think he's proven here more than any of the other baddie roles I've seen him in that he's not just a one-note hero.



Eric Roberts is in this as well, playing the devious corporate dude.  He chews up all kinds of scenery, and really takes the substandard dialog and makes it into something fun.  I noticed that he has more of these religious films to his credit than Daniels does, but I'm not sure that he's overly religious either.  I mean, it could just be that he's done more movies period.  His character doesn't get as much to do though until near the end, and it devolves into cliched villain stuff that Sheffer counters in cliched hero fashion.  I liked though that Roberts took this one-note and made the most of him.  He just seems to have fun being an actor, and playing villains at that.

We're seeing some more Craig Sheffer here.  Like Daniels and Roberts, I couldn't figure out if Sheffer was religious like this too, but unlike Daniels and Roberts who get to be baddies, Sheffer's character finds religion towards the end of the film, so if he doesn't believe this stuff, it might be a tougher bridge to cross.  I guess that's the challenge of being an actor.  Compared to his hero in Battledogs, the one in The Mark lacks the charisma that carried that other film.  I think The Asylum is better at writing heroes in their films because they write from a tradition of lantern-jawed 50s and 60s mensch-types in their modern send-ups of those films, and they've had time to hone their craft to make those guys more fun; this is definitely a much less polished hero written here, not always likable, walking around with a scowl on his face like he's a dad waiting in a long line at the Home Depot on a Saturday in late July.  The hero is the key in any film to make it work, and he has to be written well for that to happen.



Finally, I do want to touch on the theme of this movie quickly, and discuss how I think it might have been delivered better to the audience, both religious and non-religious.  It's that whole "the world is ending, and only the believers will be saved" idea, but because it's tied directly to modern events, and is set in modern times, it plays like a man with a placard around his neck bothering people in Times Square.  I think if the film were set like 50 years into the future, where the writers could have the freedom to create a total dystopian world for us to despise, and then introduce this same story with Sheffer and the microchip and The Rapture, it would have played better.  Still, the religious messages in either story, the one I'm proposing or the one we got, would have to be introduced to us organically, because, like we got here, when they don't feel natural, it throws off the pacing.

This is available on Netflix.  I'd like to say watch it for the great Gary Daniels, but the movie had a lot of flaws, and for my readers who aren't religious, those flaws will only be exacerbated by the film's religious bent.  I guess what I'd say is, if a high proselytizing content is problematic for you, I'd stay away.  Otherwise give it a look, you might have fun.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2058710/

Last Flight to Hell aka L'ultimo volo all'inferno (1990)

A friend of mine hooked me up with a copy of this from his VHS.  It looked fantastic, especially with Reb Brown and Chuck Connors, plus it's and AIP flick.  Let's see how it turned out.  Also, our friend Ty at Comeuppance Reviews has hit this one.  It definitely looks like a Ty kind of flick.

Last Flight to Hell has Reb Brown as a DEA agent in the Philippines(?) working to take down drug dealer Mike Monty.  His boss, Chuck Connors wants him brought in alive, but when he's close to catching him, some Chinese drug lord scoops him up and holds him for ransom.  So now poor Reb Brown has to go into the jungle after him, where he meets up with Monty's daughter, who has been sent in to pay the ransom.  Will they get Monty and get out alive?



Maybe my one complaint is that it's light on the Reb Brown screaming, but otherwise this delivers.  Brown is awesome, Chuck Connors is awesome, Mike Monty is awesome-- the whole thing is awesome.  Plenty of action-- they get the chopper explosion out of the way quickly--, plenty of silly low-budget moments, and tons of hallmarks you expect from Italian exploitation flicks shot in the Philippines.  We had exploding huts, we had jungle chases, and myriad local stuntmen shimmying through hails of gunfire.  The best moment comes near the end, when Brown shoots the baddie between the eyes as the guy is driving a truck to him.  The truck veers out of control, into an abandoned shack, causing it to explode, to which Brown says "just like the fourth of July" in the calmest, soberest voice possible.  Not quite as iconic as Strike Commando or Robowar, but still plenty of fun.

This is some great Reb Brown.  I think he's supposed to be more of a maverick type, with his unkempt hair and five o'clock shadow.  It doesn't come off, Brown is too good a guy, but that doesn't make you want to root for him any less.  As I said above, he doesn't really have any great screaming moments, but he has a few near ones that were nice.  The thing is, this script was cobbled together, so just watching his earnest attempt to make the most of it was plenty for me, and I'm sure you'd enjoy it too.  Depending on how big you wanted your Reb Brown film fest to be, this is a potential inclusion.



The Rifleman Chuck Connors is great in this as well.  Growing up my father used to watch The Rifleman, and I watched it with him, so that made it really cool to see him in this and get a film of his on the DTVC.  Also, I'm not entirely sure, but I think he now joins Rick Fox, who was in Resurrection, as the only two former Boston Celtics to have films on here.  Oh wait, that's right, I did Steel with Shaquille O'Neal, and he finished his career with the Celtics too.  Anyway, Connors brings that imposing screen presence to this film, and it works so well with him opposite Brown.  It must've been an honor for Brown to work with him too, and I think, while we want to mock these movies and act like being in them must be the worst things ever, I imagine for someone like Brown, to have moments like that, he must feel very lucky, and I think that's pretty cool.

The great Italian/Philippine exploitation mainstay Mike Monty is in this as the drug dealer Brown is sent to bring in.  He's not in it much after he's kidnapped early on, though he makes up for it near the end.  Still, it was disappointing, because he's so great, and I would've loved to have seen him in it more as a menacing, evil kind of figure.  He has a rather prodigious filmography, but we've only done two others of his to this point: Strike Commando, and then the Miles O'Keeffe flick Phantom Raiders.  Here's to you Mike Monty, you were one of the good ones.



Finally, I wanted to discuss the way this film handled the exploding hut element.  Instead of it being innocent villagers suffering as collateral damage, it's Brown blowing up the huts on the baddie's compound.  I've seen other films go this route before, and I have to say I like it much better.  Why blow up an innocent person's home-- or give the illusion that you are in a film-- when you don't have to?  It's much less problematic this way.

This is a really fun film, but as far as I know used VHS is the only way to go.  Amazon does have it, but it's a little pricey, so maybe for collectors in that case, but if you see it in a bargain bin I wouldn't hesitate to jump on it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102270/