Pure Danger has Howell (who also directed) as Johnie Dean (yes the name on the cover--"Between the two stars' names there is THE MAIN CHARACTER'S NAME"), a short-order cook on parole, who, with Becky (Teri Ann Linn), the server at the diner he works at, come into possession of a sack of diamonds. They're on the run from competing gangs of criminals that want to get their hands on them, and when Howell goes to his old friend (Rick Shapiro) to try and fence the ice, they end up back in the orbit of the gangsters that want to kill them. It's a wild, Spiro Razatos-action-directed ride as Johnie and Becky try to survive and get a better life for themselves. Oh, and Carrot Top appears in the final chase.
This is the fun PM ride you came for, but also it has other elements that make it even better. The C. Thomas Howell direction is fascinating. It's not like the ones Wings Hauser did, this is like wacky Tarantino, with his main character Johnie yucking it up with his mustache. Then there's the Italian gangster stereotypes, which PM was always kind of fond of anyway, but Howell has them ramped up to eleven--and perhaps 9 or 10 would've been better, because part of that ramping up to 11 is them using the N word a lot, especially directed at Leon, who's the leader of the other gang. While it feels like it's biting on Tarantino's use of the word in Pulp Fiction, in a way it also reveals how bad that was too, if that makes sense. Speaking of "if that makes sense," Carrot Top is driving a delivery truck in the big finale chase sequence. Yes, you read that right, and it's not someone who looks like Carrot Top that I'm calling Carrot Top for laughs. And the thing is, this is Carrot Top in a Spiro Razatos-action-directed chase, so it's next-level on its own, but then you add in Carrot Top and you have the kind of bonkers beauty you only find in the world of DTV. I don't put it above The Sweeper, but once you've seen that, you have to see this.
We're now at 48 PM flicks on the site. That's right, the 50 Club is in sight, and I have Steel Frontier already in the can from my guest spot on Jon Cross's PM Entertainment Podcast (episode number 3 in his archives), so we already have 49 slotted in. I recently updated my PM Letterboxd list to go from 10 to 15 movies, and this one slots in at 14 all-time. In the post-Pulp Fiction era, where the world of DTV was under constant attack by indulgent filmmakers trying to make talky, ironic gangster flicks, PM told Howell he could make his own, as long as it fit PM's rule of having action sequences every 15 minutes or so. Then they gave the action sequences to Spiro Razatos to direct, so that alone meant this was going to be great. From there though, because Howell was given the freedom to do what he wanted outside of the action, he could really go for it, with these crazy caricatures that both mock and pay homage to the genre he's working in. I think if this were made today, they'd tone down the use of the N word by the Italian gangsters--and maybe make them less stereotypical too--but outside of that, I don't know that something this fantastic would be made in the modern DTV world, which is too bad, but at least PM made it in 1996.
Spiro Razatos is closing in on the 30 Club, now with 27 films on the site, and according to IMDb we still have a lot of stuff of his from the 90s to cover, so the 30 Club shouldn't be a problem, maybe even this year. He brings it again in this one, with action sequences that lead to action sequences, shootouts that turn into foot chases, then car chases, which culminate in massive explosions. One thing he did a lot of in the final car chase was have two cars come together to smash into a third car in between them. It looked a lot like what he did in the Venom car chase, where Venom used his tentacles to smash cars together. I think that's part of what's so fun about his PM work, beyond how bonkers and beautiful it was, is you can see how he took some of these things in 90s DTV flicks, and used them in major productions that were earning $750 million to $1 billion at the box office in the 2010s. As a fan of the action genre, Razatos is just at another level, it's the kind of stuff where I'm like hook me up to an IV and mainline it right into my veins, and that's the action he gives us here.
It is kind of crazy that we're not getting to Howell until the sixth paragraph, but it just kinda worked out that way with PM and Razatos as our two Hall of Famers. That begs the question: should Howell get in? And it's a fair question, because he has some classics, to which I think we can add this one. We've inducted people with fewer films than him, and he now has two signature films in this and The Sweeper, so it's worthy of consideration, but we also have a stacked line-up of inductees for 2025 already, like Cole S. McKay--who we discovered upon finally tagging him belongs in the 50 Club!--Imperial Films, Daniel Bernhardt, and Kathleen Kinmont. That kind of locks things up for 2025, but there's always 2026, right? And if you're looking for Hall of Fame caliber Howell, after The Sweeper this is it. He's yucking it up with his mustache, but at the same time he's giving us a unique perspective, taking full advantage of the leeway PM gave him. This is the fourth Howell-directed film we've seen on the site, after The Day the Earth Stopped, War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave, and The Land That Time Forgot, all of those being Asylum films, and so it's probably no surprise that the first of his two PM films he directed that we're covering here shoots to the top of the list.
Finally, when we see Donny "Don" Most as Howell's parole officer early in the film, I figured he'd have this seventh paragraph locked up, and I'd spend it talking about Happy Days, maybe getting into how the "Jump the Shark" episode didn't kill the show, that they actually went on for another 5 seasons, many of which as the top-rated comedy in America. I was mentally drafting the paragraph as the film went on, only to discover Carrot Top--yes, the Carrot Top, Scott "Carrot Top" Thompson--driving the delivery truck in the final chase scene. What do you do with that? You just sit back and love it, that's all you can do. Looking at his IMDb, he was also in the Howell-directed Hourglass, so they must have been, or maybe even still are, friends, which may explain something else. Courtney Thorne-Smith appeared with Howell in the volleyball classic Side Out (another plus for Howell's Hall of Fame case). When Carrot Top was making Chairman of the Board, did Howell suggest Thorne-Smith for his leading lady in that film? Which would mean Side Out set in motion a series of events that led us to Thorne-Smith going on Conan O'Brien to do publicity for the season finale of Melrose Place, where Chairman of the Board was mentioned, and Norm MacDonald famously took it down. Also mentioned in that appearance, Donny "Don" Most, so it all comes full circle.
And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently this is on YouTube, Fawesome, Plex, and the Roku Channel here in the States. I mention all of these, because some have edited-for-TV versions, so you want to be careful of that. The YouTube one is uncut, so that one's safe. This is another fun PM ride, well-worth checking out.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117406
And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!