Frankenhooker (1990)

Back in April on episode 156 of the podcast, we had Freddie Young from Full Moon Reviews on to discuss this horror classic. I'd been meaning to get more horror on both the site and pod, and also been meaning to get more of Frank Henenlotter's stuff on, so that worked out on both scores. It was also great to get his take on how New York City has changed since this film was released. In addition to us, Freddie covered this on his site, Full Moon Reviews, as well.

Frankenhooker is about a guy named Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) from New Jersey whose fiancee Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) is chopped apart in a horrific lawnmower accident. Unable to move on, he tries to piece her back together, and then develops a process to bring her back to life. Unfortunately, they couldn't find all of her body parts, so he needs to get some new ones. Who better than some ladies of the night plying their trade in Times Square? After he accidentally kills a bunch of them with some explosive crack, he takes the spare parts back to his lab to reanimate his fiancee--but when he does, will he like the results?

This is the classic you expect it to be, it hits all the right notes. It has the late 80s/early 90s feel you want; the goofy, sick, twisted humor from a horror comedy that is equal parts macabre and hilarious; but then also this novel concept that works even considering how crazy it is. I loved the scene after the fiancee's death, when Jeffrey is watching the news and a reporter is interviewing a police detective who's describing the process of trying to find all her body parts as "she's just one big jigsaw puzzle." As the name implies, this is also an homage to Frankenstein, and Henenlotter does a great job with that as well, mixing what was then a modern 1990's setting with the schlock horror films of the 50s and 60s that he grew up with. One of the best scenes is when he reanimates Elizabeth, the mix of animation and practical effects, it looks great, but also doesn't betray the camp and humor this is going for. This one is a classic for a reason, and well worth the watch.

It's been awhile since I've seen Basket Case or Brain Damage, but I think out of the three, I like this one best. The budget was a little bigger, Henenlotter was more experienced as a director, and the concept was more novel and interesting--and was executed better, which always helps. As much of a classic as this is though, and as big a name as Henenlotter has in the horror world, he doesn't have many other feature film credits to his name. Just this, Brain Damage, three Basket Case movies, and in 2008 a film called Bad Biology. Since then he's done a few documentaries, the last one coming in 2018, and that's it. The good news is though, all of his feature films are available on free streamers, with everything but Bad Biology on Tubi, and that one on Plex.

We always talk about New York City being its own character in a film, and Henelotter was one of the best to use the city that way. What's interesting is just how much it's changed since 1990 when this was made. Times Square is not a place where people can engage sex workers, it's tourist trap where you can get pictures with Marvel characters and have lunch at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. or Olive Garden. When Franken asks a guy where his fiancee ran off to, and the guy responds in Swedish, he says "You're speaking to me in Swedish in Times Square!", because back then the idea of tourists going to Times Square was unfathomable. For me, I never saw that earlier incarnation, my first trip to Times Square was in 2014 when my wife and I had a layover at Penn Station between trains, and she took me there so I could see it. That's one thing that was great about having Fred on the pod to discuss this, he's a lifelong resident of NYC, so he's seen the changes and could speak to it better. Maybe that's why Henenlotter doesn't make movies anymore, New York is no longer the New York he knew--though I would love to see a sequel to this where Elizabeth is in Times Square interacting with tourists in jorts and fanny packs.

This was a Troma release, so we have the Troma opening, which is one of the best for me. Ty from Comeuppance and I were talking about this, how there aren't as many iconic low-budget releasing and production company openings as there used to be. Cannon, PM, Vestron, Imperial--I could go on, but like Troma, they give you a comfort food feeling that gets you in the right frame of mind before you start your film, as opposed to the current DTV climate where you may have anywhere from 6-8 companies before the film starts, all as indistinguishable from the one before it, engendering a sense of cynicism that puts you in the wrong frame of mind and makes the film work uphill before it even starts. The other thing about Troma is they've been a victim of the changing New York we were talking about in the previous paragraph, priced out of Hell's Kitchen and forced to move to Long Island City in Queens. When I started the site, I expected to have more Troma, but with the way the action reviews blew up, Troma was left behind, and now we're 1250-plus posts in and this is only their 12th tag. I always say "we'll have to work on fixing that," but I never seem to get around to it, so I'll leave at as Troma is one of the all-time greats, and the DTV and low budget film world wouldn't be what it is without them.

Finally, in the opening scene, before Elizabeth is cut up by the lawnmower, Elizabeth, Jeffrey, and her mother are in the house, when her mother says "I need to make my cole slaw." It was a reminder of how much things have changed since this came out, when my initial thought was "she's going to dump a bunch of pre-cut ingredients from a bag into a bowl," and instead saw her pull out a big head of cabbage and start cutting. Yes Matt, at one time--and within your lifetime--that's how cole slaw was made, it wasn't bought pre-cut at the grocery store. The thing is though, I love the pre-cut stuff. I guess the kids would call it a "hack," but I saute it with my onions, mushrooms, and tofu when I'm making fried rice. Mix in some soy sauce and rice vinegar, and it's perfect. 

With that, I think it's time to wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi, which I think is a great way to watch it--though if you're a collector and you don't have this, it's one you should add. This is the fun horror classic romp you came for, great for a bad movie night with friends. And if you haven't yet, you can check out the podcast episode I did with Fred from Full Moon Reviews, number 156 in the archives.

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

The Gardiner (2021)

This is it, we're finally covering The Gardiner on here, and finally getting Gary Daniels into the 60 Club with Dolph--who's technically in the 70 Club, but who's counting? In addition to us, The guys at Comeuppance and Todd Gaines at Bulletproof have covered this too.

The Gardiner has the Bronson-faced Robert Bronzi as our eponymous hero, tending the garden for a rich family of Brits pretending to be Americans while living in England--at least that's the best explanation for why the family are all UK actors playing Americans while living in the UK. Anyway, at the same time Gary Daniels plays Volker, a baddie who runs a crew of guys who steal things from people's homes. After a recent break-in turns into a home invasion and double homicide, Volker wants this job done right. But when the daughter of the family decides to join her boyfriend during the holiday instead of travel with her family, they cancel their trip, leaving them ripe for these baddies when they break-in. Unfortunately for the baddies though, as their home invasion unfolds, the Gardiner has other plans for them.

What is there to say about this one? It's a home invasion movie that tries to pad out the home invasion by taking its time to get there, and does a decent job of it. Then they use the Three Stooges "there's a man in a gorilla suit taking everyone out in a mansion" paradigm, only here Bronzi as said guy in a gorilla suit--sans gorilla suit unfortunately, because that would've made this movie a ten!--is killing everyone, instead of tying them up and putting them in a closet for laughs. My one complaint would be that I'd like more Daniels, but when you see Bronzi's fighting, you realize pairing him with Daniels wouldn't work if they did it too much, so they have to save it for the end. I guess that's a good way to mitigate it. There were also weird decisions, like setting the film in the UK, and using all UK actors, but having the actors playing the family members play them as Americans. Why would you need to do that? Let everyone be Brits, that's my motto.

We finally got Daniels to the 60 Club, but we made it a year late, because he's now 61, which means Dolph remains the only actor on the site to have more films than his age. And a big reason for that was how hard this was to get on a free streamer. I guess I could've paid for it, but I got the sense from the trailer that this wasn't worth rental money, and I was right about that, this is more a good value for a free streamer or a streaming service you're already subscribed to. The thing is, he's had two films released since this one, Bring Him Back Dead and Repeater, which are both on Tubi, and it feels like this film was made for Tubi, but how can you know in the current streaming climate--though to be fair, this was on Tubi for like a week, then mysteriously was removed. After that it was on Prime for like two weeks, and then too was mysteriously removed, only to be as mysteriously restored, and I figured at that point I couldn't mess around. As far as a Daniels film goes, I think this is around the middle of his movies. It could've been worse, but we've also seen better from him. What I liked was how present he was. At this stage of his career he could start mailing in small cameos like his fellow stars, but he's not doing that, and I think I appreciate that in this film more than anything.

We're finally getting a Robert Bronzi film on the site, and it took Daniels to get us there. He really does look a lot like Bronson, and while he really isn't Bronson the way we understand Bronson with his screen presence, he does a good enough job here giving you Bronson-enough, if that makes sense? Like he's not just a look-alike, he's trying to channel him, which works enough in a movie like this that can use that kind of energy. I wouldn't want to see him in something like a remake of Death Wish--or hell even Death Wish V--but in the same way that Tito Ortiz can give you a cheap Vin Diesel, or Gruner or Bernhardt can approximate Van Damme, Bronzi works enough to punch up a DTV on-the-cheap UK production, which when you add in a name like Daniels, it can get you to the church on time. Speaking of Ortiz, it looks like he has a film with him coming up, which should be fun. Why not just do a whole Expendables movie with clones? I think there's a market for that--which is probably just us, but we're enough of a market... I think.

The only other name in this I recognized was Sarah T. Cohen, but I couldn't figure out from what, and when I looked her up on IMDb, I hadn't seen any of her films. Then I realized, she had been in films that starred, or were directed by or written by, people who were in films I'd reviewed. For example, she's done a few films written by friend of the site and podcast guest Tom Jolliffe. A lot of the films he does as more of a gun for hire like that are shot in the UK but made for American audiences, so all of the cast need to pull out their best American accents, like Cohen and the other family members do in this. She's had to play Americans so much that on her IMDb page she has an American accent demo reel. I guess it makes sense if the movie is marketed to Americans, but something like this that's more international, and actually set in England, I don't really get it--unless for Cohen and the other actors playing family members, a selling point was adding another clip to their American accent demo reel. "Hey, we can't pay you a lot for this, but we'll make the family Americans so you can further show the world how great your American accent is!" "My agent's telling me to take, fine."

Finally, this might be it for Daniels for a while, because after this film we have two Christian movies, a few foreign films, a 3-hour Bruce Lee biopic, and some film called A Stranger in Paradise that I can't seem to find. If you add all that up, if I were do do them all, that's only seven films--and I don't know how much any of them outside of A Stranger in Paradise I want to review--meaning he can't catch Dolph's 70. On the other hand, Art Camacho is at 52, and he probably has enough work out there to catch Daniels, but the next actor after him is Rothrock at 43, and I don't know that she has 17 films that haven't been reviewed in order to catch Daniels, so he's safe at two. Going into making the DTVC, I would've expected Dolph to have the most films, but I had no idea Daniels would not only be the second-most, but the second-most by an unreachable margin. 60 films is a big deal, and deserves its due. Here's to you Mr. Daniels, you're one of the greatest to ever do it.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can get this on Prime, but that can change really quickly, as we've seen over the past couple years. It's worth it as a Daniels film on a free streamer, or a streaming service you already have, but I don't know if you need to rent it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11217036

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

Top Gunner (2020)

This is a film Ty from Comeuppance and I looked at on the pod when we did our Eric Roberts double feature back in April. That's episode 154 in the archives. As far as I can tell, no one else has touched this one. Maybe with good reason?

Top Gunner has Eric Roberts as an officer in the Air Force who has a training base for pilots in a remote location. When some of them cause trouble, he forces them to stay during the holiday weekend while everyone else is on leave. After a special forces team grabs a Russian bioweapon with the intent of getting it to scientists in Washington so they can reverse engineer a cure, they need to make a pit stop at Roberts's base. The problem is, the Russians are hot on their tail, and have waylaid them there. Will Roberts's rag tag group trouble-making trainees be able to fend off the Russians?

This isn't horrible, but there is a sense of, what am I doing here? They set up some corrugated iron shacks near an old abandoned highway, CGI'd in some planes, then tossed in a dash of Eric Roberts. Is that it for The Asylum now? This is their Top Gun: Maverick mockbuster? But then there's also a sense of "what did you want this to be, Matt?" which I also get, and I think if pressed, this is probably about what I expected, and the fact that I can at least say it isn't horrible is saying something--even if it's not saying much. The Asylum is like getting the generic Doritos, and I think there's always that first bite where I go in expecting real Doritos, and end up a little disappointed, when I only have myself to blame for not ponying up the extra couple bucks to just get Doritos.

There are three of these films, and I believe that's because this was supposed to be released to coincide with Top Gun: Maverick, but that film was delayed so much that they had to put out another movie in order to capitalize, and then once they did that they figured they might as well do a third. The second one doesn't have Roberts, but the third one does, and none of the three have anything to do with each other. This is now 36 films for The Asylum, which means they're close to one of the more exalted clubs at the DTVC, the 40 Club. On the one hand, it seems wrong to have them in a club like that--wrong enough that they're in the Hall of Fame even--but on the other, they've been doing this Mockbuster thing a couple years longer than we've been doing the DTVC, and they're still going strong...(ish). I think that has to count for something, and for that I applaud them.

Eric Roberts, who is known for his vast CV, is only at 16 films now on the site, which doesn't sound right, but when you look at the films he does and who's--or rather who isn't--in them, you get a better sense of why he's only where he's at. Is there anyone who's better at ranting with the wall of a corrugated iron shed behind him? Like were they borrowing a trailer on a construction site to do his scenes? When his wife called him about this, he was probably like "how many locations and how many wardrobe changes?" and she said "one location, no wardrobe changes, you're wearing an Air Force pilot jumpsuit the whole time." "So I gotta unzip my shirt to go to the bathroom?" "It's just one day of shooting." And like the trooper he is, he delivered.

One thing The Asylum got right was the fact that fighter jet dogfights can only get you so far, so they were smart to pad things out with this other plot about the bioweapon. The problem is, the other plot was kind of a dud too. What the movie should've been was 80 minutes of Eric Roberts in a corrugated iron shed yelling at young trainees. But then the problem there is, you can't get that much footage out of Roberts with the limited time you have to shoot with him. Could you loop it then? Like the same rant, over and over, maybe set to a Vaporwave soundtrack, and the trainees, when they're not flying CGI planes, they're struggling to get AOL and Windows 95 to work. I'm just throwing ideas out here, but I do kinda feel like my idea would be the best Asylum film ever.

 
Finally, even The Asylum isn't immune to the trend of not using numbers for sequels. Can we blame them though, when they're Mockbustering Hollywood, and that's what Hollywood's doing? I would love to see them full-on Mockbuster that. Like make the movie I described above, but call it "Herring: A Top Gunner Saga." If you're wondering, they did do their own Mockbusters for Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, called Road Wars and Road Wars: Max Fury, which is okay, but I feel like it's a bit of a mail-in from The Asylum. Why not go with Max Fury: A Road Wars Saga? Come on guys, you're slipping.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is almost exactly what you'd expect from an Asylum Mockbuster on Top Gun: Maverick--maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but almost exactly. If you need a little Eric Roberts on a free streamer to pass the time, you could do worse than this. You could do better too, but you could do worse.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12226808

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

The Adventures of Taura: Prison Ship Star Slammer aka Star Slammer (1986)

Back in April I did a film called Galaxy Warriors for my indie review, and I watched this then as a means of comparison. Considering it was directed by DTVC Hall of Famer Fred Olen Ray, and has DTVC favorite Ross Hagen in it, I figured it needed a review as well.

Star Slammer has Sandy Brooke as Taura, a woman living on a planet somewhere in outer space, having a pretty nice life, until Ross Hagen and Dukey Flyswatter show up with some other baddies and cause trouble. They're there as representatives of a galactic empire, which means when Taura takes the henchmen out and burns Hagen's hand in the process, she's sent to a space prison run by a lesbian dominatrix, Warden Exene (Marya Gant), and her lackey Muffin (Dawn Wildsmith). She's tossed in a cell block with some rough characters, led by Mikey (Suzy Stokey), who give her a hard time at first, but after she saves Mikey's life from a large monster, they team up to take everyone out. At the same time Hagen and Flyswatter show up to inspect the prison, so Taura can get her revenge on them too. Sometimes everything just works out.

This is the fun time you want from a movie like this. It plays on all the exploitation notes you'd expect, from women in bondage, to lady-on-lady action, to women in various stages of undress, but it also has a lot of enjoyable elements that go beyond that. Sandy Brooke is a fun lead who brings you back to actors like Pam Grier and Margaret Markhov, and Suzy Stokey is great as the antagonist that Brooke wins over. Also I enjoyed Gant as the warden, she played that part to a T, but she also brought in some "women dealing with men in the workplace" elements that I wasn't expecting which were funny too. For some reason these movies often have a warden and a lackey, and Dawn Wildsmith was great in that lackey role too, being creepy and villainous. And then you have Ross Hagen and Dukey Flyswatter, aka Michael Sonye, who were fantastic. I love seeing them in anything, but they were particularly fun here. This just works on a lot of levels and will get you to the church on time.

Unlike Galaxy Warriors, which tried to make an Impossible Burger version of this type of film by removing the women in bondage and girl-on-girl exploitative aspects, this film leaned into them fully. That's not why it worked better though, I think an Impossible Burger version is still possible to make right. This worked because it had some really fun performances, the jokes landed better, and the effects were more realistic. I looked, and IMDb said this had a budget of $200,000, which is a lot more than Galaxy Warriors probably had, but it's not like this had a lot either--and I imagine a lot of that $200,000 went to the cast. So how does a Galaxy Warriors pull something like this off then? I think that's where Fred Olen Ray comes in. The sense of humor, the relationships with cast and crew, the experience to get things done quick and on the cheap, it's all there. We can poke fun at these all we want--and the volume with which Ray makes these means they aren't all hits--but there's a talent there to make these work at the level they do beyond the T-n'-A, and we can see it here. For anyone trying to make an Impossible Burger version of this, study the other things Ray does well here and try to replicate them.

Part of the strength of a movie like this is a great lead. With the 70s Corman films it was Pam Grier, who was maybe the best to ever do it. Sandy Brooke is great here too. She mixes the fun with the serious, all while getting groped and wearing a ripped tank-top without a bra underneath. Looking at her IMDb bio, she only has 11 credits, and many of them are much smaller parts than this. It's possible most of the parts she was offered after were like this one, which may not be as much fun to play, even if she was great at it. That's an area where the Impossible Burger version has an advantage, the star isn't put through the ringer as much, but in the 80s there wasn't an Impossible Burger version of anything--veggie burgers were something different from an actual burger, and no one considered that anything could approximate the real thing, all while cattle farming was being consolidated under Reagan's deregulation policies into the factory farms we have today, so at the same time that plant-based burgers were getting better, the inhumanely factory-raised beef we started getting was tasting worse. Is that another thing to consider? That the DTV market is just as assembly-line now that the quality of the films is such that an Impossible Burger version doesn't look so bad? But also, while a Sandy Brooke would only have had the real version of this kind of movie to make in the 80s, could we see more actresses like her take on these roles in a new Impossible Burger version? That might be the kind of thing that punches the Impossible Burger version up.

The other thing of course was having Ross Hagen and Dukey Flyswatter. Look at how great they look down there. The outfits alone were fantastic, but then you throw in their performances. Back in May of 2022 I had Kevin Vonesper on the podcast to talk about the documentary he was putting together, The Life and Slimes of Dukey Flyswatter and Haunted Garage, which is still in production as we speak, but hopefully will be out soon. That's episode 98 in the archives if you want to check it out, but he gave us a lot of great info on Flyswatter. Then we have the Ross Hagen, who's now on 8 films on the site. I don't know if the Hall of Fame is in his future, mostly because we don't see him as often on here, but between his performances in this film and Action USA, he's gotta be close. There's an inspired element here with Flyswatter and Hagen, they're bringing an energy to the proceedings that the film needed, and I think for people looking to make movies like this today, find people who can give you this--and if they're a bit more of a known commodity, pay for that one day of shooting to get this out of them--though if you can't, just come up with the outfits. Hagen's was probably recycled from another film, but how hard would Flyswatter's 80s suit and hair be to pull off?

Finally, we're at 16 director credits for Fred Olen Ray on the site. That puts him three up on Sam Firstenberg for second-most all-time as a director, but 27 behind Albert Pyun. The thing is, Ray has the CV, even if most of his output now is Christmas movies, I think I could count off 27 movies in the 80s and 90s that he's done that would be perfect for the site, but when will I get them done? I realized the last film of his I did was his Hall of Fame induction post back in October of 2020. That's way too long to go, but how much more frequently could I get to? One every three or four months? Call that four a year, so in 7 years we could be there? I'm not saying Pyun's director record is like Cy Young's career win total of 511 games, which will never be touched with the current five-man rotation in baseball where pitchers barely get 30 games a season, but it's kind of close to that when you consider how my cutting back to one review a week is similar to the baseball five-man rotation. When guys like Dolph, Camacho, Pyun, Daniels, Rothrock, etc. were racking up big numbers, I was doing upwards of three posts a week. There was a lot of tagging to be had at that time, just like when Cy Young pitched, pitchers pitched much more often, so there were a lot of wins to be had. So if we call Dolph the Babe Ruth of DTV action stars, is Pyun the Cy Young of DTV directors? Maybe?

Before I bore you with too many baseball analogies--especially for our readers outside the States who have no idea about baseball--let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this on Tubi in America. That's a great way to make it happen, grab some pizzas and some beverages and put this on a Saturday movie night with one or two other movies, and you'll be all set.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087945

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

Nine Deaths of the Ninja (1985)

Last month Chris from Bulletproof Action asked if I'd like to be a part of the Sho Kosugi collaboration post he was putting together for Mr. Kosugi's birthday, and of course I was in; but I realized in looking at the films he wanted us to rank, I hadn't seen this one yet. A major oversight on my part, but now that I have I figured I'd review it myself. In addition to us and Chris at Bulletproof, this has also been covered by the guys at Comeuppance, Kenner at Movies in the Attic, Mitch at the Video Vacuum, and Karl at Fist of the B-List. You can see how late to the party I am.

Nine Deaths of the Ninja has our hero Mr. Kosugi, as Spike Shinobi who, along with Brent Huff and Emilia Crow, are part of an elite anti-terrorist team. When a be-wheel-chaired former Nazi (Blackie Dammett) enlists a gang of women commandos led by a woman named Honey Hump (Regina Richardson) to hijack a tour group in the Philippines, former tennis pro Vijay Amritraj calls our team in as quickly as possible to take them down. But it's a race against time, as the baddie has a lot of hostages--including Kosugi's real-life kids, Shane and Kane--and he isn't afraid to kill them.

This is the fun ninja action that I'm looking for from something like this. Sure, we could've used more actual "ninja action," but between how much bonkers stuff is going on, and the solid 80s action quotient, it does what I need. Where do I start? Maybe the opening credits where Kosugi is demonstrating his martial arts techniques while scantily clad women are doing an interpretive dance routine around him. Or when the baddies first hijack the tour bus, and later that evening one of the grunts attempts to rape the tour guide, so a young Kane Kosugi runs up behind him and sets his blue undies ablaze, sending the guy running down the aisle while sparks appear to be shooting out of his buttocks through the underwear. Also, that tour guide's character name is listed as "tour guide." You've got Huff and Kosugi doing some kind of undercover work that doesn't always make sense, but somehow it gets them to where the baddies are. And then the head baddie himself, Blackie Dammett's Nazi in a wheelchair with a monkey in a diaper as a companion, only to be outdone by Regina Richardson as Honey Hump. So we have this fun ridiculousness, but at the same time, we have some great action sequences, like Kosugi undercover as an elderly gentleman doing some Old Man Fu while Huff is trying to hook up with a young lady that works for Amritraj; or the end scenes, which were fantastic. This is just a fun time all around.

We're at 8 Kosugi films on the site, but looking at his bio, there isn't much else after this. He did an 80s set in the 50s teen sex romp called Aloha Summer that's on YouTube that we could do, but that's about it. And I don't know that it matters. Sure, we'd love to have more Kosugi, but these 80s ninja actioners are so great in themselves that they have an outsized influence on the entire DTV action world beyond what another DTV star with only that many credits would've had. And while this may not quite touch the heights of his best ones, it delivers what you want, and in some ways because it's so much fun compared to some of his darker ones--I'm looking at you Pray for Death--it has a bit of an edge on those for me. His last film was 2009's Ninja Assassin, so if this is it for him, we really only have those 80s ninja films as his legacy, but what a legacy it is. Whenever I see one of those engagement-farm-y "name an actor who had a better run than..." posts on Twitter, I think for me I'd take the Pepsi Challenge with Kosugi's 80s ninja stuff against anyone else.

One interesting twist in this was Emilia Crow's character (credited as Emilia Lesniak). While Kosugi and Huff were more out in the field, she was the computer whiz, communications expert, and the person with all the intel that helps us with background on characters through plot exposition. Usually that part is reserved for a geekier looking guy, but I thought she did really well with it. There was also a sense that she had some sexual tension with both Huff and Kosugi, like we couldn't tell if she was jealous Huff was going on a date with the other woman, or if she didn't care because she wanted to hook up with Kosugi, or if she didn't care because she didn't want to hook up with either of them. Had this been an 80s TV show, they could've played on those interactions much more. What a cool idea for an 80s TV show, these three traveling the globe, taking out terrorists and other assorted baddies, with some Diane-and-Sam-style will-they-or-won't-they screwball comedy notes. It's kind of a reverse Three Kinds of Heat, but also a major missed opportunity.

Among the other names, this is Kane Kosugi's 8th film on the site, same as his father. When we think of someone paying their dues to get into the biz, Kosugi has to be up there, because he was playing hostages and kidnap victims quite a bit when he was younger. His collaborations with Kaos will probably get his tag count above his father's, especially with Kaos having something in post-production that also has DTVC Hall of Famer Peter Weller in it. This is also 8 films for Brent Huff--I found out as I was posting this that I forgot to tag him for 1997's The Bad Pack--which I also don't even remember reviewing! This was only a few years before Strike Commando 2, and while he spent much of the 80s and 90s in the DTV world, he's carved out a nice career for himself in modern TV, which is good to see. Then we had former tennis pro Vijay Amritraj, who from 1983 to 1986 did Octopussy, this, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Talk about your three-picture run, it doesn't get much better than that. Finally Blackie Dammett, who plays the main baddie, has been on here one other time, in the Wings Hauser-Sybil Danning thriller LA Bounty, which is easily one of the greatest films we've reviewed on site.

Finally, with only the one paragraph left, I wanted to mention Lisa Friedman as Tour Guide. According to IMDb, she only did two other films, the 1980 Woody Allen film Stardust Memories, where she played "Fan in the Lobby;" and the 1981 car race thriller King of the Mountain, where she played "Spandex Girl." "Tour Guide" is definitely a step up from those two, but considering what the role entailed, I feel like she deserved better--like maybe a name? She starts out just being a tour guide, as her name suggests, but when the bus is taken hostage, later in the evening there's the assault, where this gross guy puts tape over her mouth while she's sleeping, then drags her to the back of the bus to have his way with her, only to fortunately have Kane Kosugi save the day. Later that same baddie decides he's going to have his way with her again, so he takes her behind some rocks, where fortunately our heroes step in this time to save her. It's definitely great that she was saved both times--we've seen darker versions of movies like these think it's necessary to go all the way--but just the fact that she was put through the ringer like that tells me she deserves better than just "Tour Guide" for her character name. Here's to you Lisa Friedman, you were a trooper.

And with that let's wrap this up. You can get this on YouTube or Plex here in the States. YouTube might actually be better because the version isn't bad, and Plex is horrible with commercials. This is a fun, lighter Kosugi film, which I appreciated. It's also a bit on the bonkers side, which may work in its favor. Also don't forget to check out the Ranked Kosugi list on Bulletproof Action! It was a lot of fun, and I was glad I was able to contribute.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089689

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

Enemy Gold (1993)

In our continuing quest to get all of Sidaris's LETHAL Ladies films on the site, we come to this one, the first of the post-Dona Speir entries. "Bullets, Bombs and Babes," does it get any better? I'm not sure, but the person who made the poster wasn't a fan of the Oxford Comma. Are "bullets," "bombs," and "babes" all separate, or do the "bombs" and "babes" come as a package?

Enemy Gold is a reset of the LETHAL Ladies films. No Dona Speir, no Cynthia Brimhall, and no Abilene that can't shoot straight. We do have Penhall back, this time in Dallas with Mark Barriere (who had a small part in Fit to Kill) and Suzi Simpson, trying to take down drug kingpin Rodrigo Obregon. The problem is, a crooked member of the agency is standing in their way, and gets them suspended. As you can imagine, this isn't enough for Obregon, so he calls in assassin Jewel Panther (Julie Strain) and they go into the woods of Louisiana where our trio is camping out. At the same time, our trio thinks they may have found some long lost Confederate soldier gold. They're all on a collision course to wackiness.

This is an interesting entry in the series. It has everything you want, plenty of bullets, bombs, and babes, but I think as a kind of reboot or refresh of the series, this newer iteration hits its stride more with Dallas Connection, mostly because Julie K. Smith gives it the energy it needed. We also don't get quite as much Strain as we'd want, but what we get is great. I do like too that it was trying to move this series in a new direction, that Fit to Kill was the end of something, and almost right away we know we're experiencing something new from the Dallas landscape instead of Hawai'i, and Mark Barriere shoots and hits his target when he and Penhall are raiding the drug operation--Penhall even tells him "nice shot." No more Abilene who can't shoot straight here. This also wasn't directed by Andy Sidaris, his son Christian takes over, but he only directs this one and Dallas Connection before Andy steps back in. I don't know that that gives this a different feel though, Christian seems to maintain his father's vision of how these things should look. There are plenty of B n' B sex scenes ("boobs n' butt"), plenty of explosions, and plenty of scenes of women changing. This may not be the best of the LETHAL Ladies films, but it's still a really fun time.

This is now 8 films for Julie Strain on the site, which doesn't sound like many, but 8 puts her in a three-way tie for second-most all time by a woman on the site with Shannon Tweed and Kathleen Kinmont, which is 34 behind Cynthia Rothrock for the most all-time. Her first appearance in the film is her driving a convertible with her hair all over the place, just letting us know she's coming, so when she gets to the Cowboy Club and a guy outside hits on her, we're ready for her to knee him in the nuts and headbutt him. I'd like to believe she's unabashedly Strain from there, but we don't quite get enough of her, because we have the story around the gold, we have Obregon's other goons, and we have Tanquil Lisa Collins's character trying to get our heroes off suspension. This is another thing that's corrected in Dallas Connection, as Strain gets after it right away in that one. Still, she's great here, even in her limited capacity.

As I mentioned above, this is produced by Sidaris, not directed, but he still gets a tag for that production work, which gives him 10 total now. This series alone is definitely consideration for a Hall of Fame induction, and even in the capacity of executive producer, his stamp is still on it. From a DTV franchise standpoint, Bloodfist is the only other one in its realm, but these are iconic in a way that the Bloodfist films aren't. If you say "a Sidaris film," people know right away what you mean, and the fact that these are all on Tubi in all their glory is fantastic. When I was younger, these were either on a premium channel on cable--which I would only get as a free preview--or when I got older, there were edited versions on TBS after a midnight airing of Road House. I still get reminders of that time when I see the opening titles in that classic Sidaris typefont, telling us Bruce Penhall and Julie Strain are in the film, only now I'm not wasted and trying to get the room to stop spinning. Here's to you Mr. Sidaris, you truly were one of the greatest for giving us these films.

The United States is a big country, both population-wise and land-wise, and films like this remind me that even someone who's spent his whole life here doesn't really know it as well as you'd think, because it's so big. For example, in this film, the characters go from Dallas, Texas to the Shreveport, Louisiana area, which seems like they should be far apart, but they're less than 3 hours away from each other. Part of it I think is my Northeast bias, but even then, when I was growing up, I had no idea that Philadelphia and New York City were so close, and they aren't as far away as Dallas and Shreveport are from Kittery, Maine. But I imagine people in Dallas can't believe that Kittery, Maine is so close to Boston, Massachusetts, or that it's as close to Providence, Rhode Island as Dallas is from Shreveport. That's why I watch Sidaris films though, to get more in touch with my sense of American geography.

That felt like it could've been the seventh paragraph, so what could I be adding here? It's the fact that in between the last two times I've seen this, I've actually visited Dallas myself. One of the nights I was there I caught a Texas Rangers baseball game, and on the Lyft ride back I got to see this view of the city at night. For people who haven't been before, it's the fourth largest metro area in the US, but it's not like the three cities above it, New York, LA, and Chicago. My Lyft driver told me, it can't decide if it wants to be Atlanta or LA or New York, but I also got the sense that it could've been a real world city like New York or Chicago, but the state of Texas couldn't let that happen. Texas wants to be too provincial to have a world city--or maybe it's afraid of what losing some of that provincialness by having a world city would mean. We're seeing similar struggles in Florida and Georgia with Miami and Atlanta growing, and the people in those states afraid of the same thing Texans were afraid of with Dallas. What you get with them is this uniquely American thing. Dallas feels like it could be a New York or Chicago, but it also feels like it can't, and I don't know that there's anything more American than that--which makes it a great place to set a Sidaris film.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Tubi, which is probably the best way. There's also the Mill Creek DVD, which, if you get that, means you won't have to worry if Tubi ever takes it down--which they've done before. It may not be the best entry in the series, but it's still a lot of fun.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106819

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

Alien Uprising aka UFO (2012)

This is one that's been sitting in my Tubi queue for a while now. It's got Van Damme, so I knew I needed to do it at some point; but it also didn't look that great, none of the other big low-budget action sites had covered it, and it was over 100 minutes long. But then Tubi was about to get rid of it, so I figured I'd better make it happen.

Alien Uprising has a group of young people in Derby who go out to a night club and get into some trouble. One of the group is Pierce Brosnan's son Sean, and he meets Jean-Claude Van Damme's daughter Bianca, and the two hook up. The next day, the power's out, and things seem weird. No one thinks too much of it, until the next day a massive UFO is resting in the sky. Now all hell breaks loose, as people are scrambling to get supplies and fighting with each other, while the army is confronting the aliens. Somehow Jean-Claude Van Damme figures in as well. Will the kids make it out alive?

And do we care? Kind of, maybe. There was one character I cared about, so I guess that's something. There was a lot sauteed in wrong sauce here though. First, most of these kids aren't worth caring about, and the movie wrote them that way, so I wasn't sure why I was following them. We also could've trimmed a good 20 minutes off the beginning and been okay. The club scene went on too long, the sex scene went on too long, the next morning stuff went on too long. There was a fight scene between Sean Brosnan and another guy that was also too long, but not only that, chock full of interspersed slo-mo. Like Brosnan kicks a guy in the head, and for some reason they decided to slow that down, only to speed it up right after. Was it that cool of an effect? Finally, the worst part--spoiler alert--everyone dies at the end. If everyone dies at the end, what's the point? Why put everyone through this if you're just going to kill them all off? We did have some moments of legitimate tension, which I think would've had more punch if this was tighter. I guess this is for Van Damme completists only, which is what I am, so if you have a review site and need to get all of Van Damme's stuff reviewed, it's worth it for that.

This is now 34 films for Van Damme on the site. (He has 35 tags, but one is for Post 400, the Van Damme Film Fest.) Can we get him to the 40 Club? Based on my math, we have his newest one, Darkness of Man, and then three others from the 2010s, which gets us to 38, plus he has some stuff in pre-production, so we might get there--though we know from The Eagle Path what can happen with those pre-production movies: nothing. He has a very small part in this, where he comes in at the very end as a former military guy who knows what's happening with the aliens. He sticks around long enough to have a fight scene with his daughter--so he's now had them with two of his kids, after having them in multiple films with his son Kris--then gets blown up by a laser from an alien ship. Again, it's just about being a Van Damme completist, and now I can officially say I've seen this and reviewed it.

Speaking of Bianca Van Damme (credited as Bianca Bree here), I didn't realize that this is her fifth film on the site. (If you're curious, Kris has nine so far.) As I mentioned above, she has a fight scene with her father, and based on her bio, she's trained in martial arts, so she may not have been doubled as much as I thought. Based on her skills and action star lineage, she could have a solid DTV action career, not just in low-budget stuff like this, but those higher-budget things that get picked up by Netflix or end up on Hulu after a short rental window on Amazon. Olga Kurylenko would be a good comp, but again, being able to put the name "Van Damme" on the tin would be a bigger selling point. You could also see lesser roles in big screen films the way Scott Adkins and Daniel Bernhardt have done, like a one-off baddie in that new John Wick film The Ballerina. Imagine if that happened, and Van Damme had to ask his daughter to get him on set instead of the other way around?

I mentioned above that we also had Pierce Brosnan's son in this, but I didn't realize that when I was grabbing images, I thought he was just your run of the mill 2010s bro dinkus type, until I started writing the review and saw who he was, and by then I'd missed my window to grab the images on Tubi. Throughout the movie I was trying to figure out what he looked like, beyond the 2010s bro dinkus type, and when I saw his picture on IMDb it clicked: lead singer of a third-tier 80s British pop act. And maybe not even an actual Brit, but like a Scandinavian or Northern European playing in the third-tier pop act. I wish the filmmakers had had the sense to let him run with that instead, just said "give us full lead singer of A-ha or Nik Kershaw. Just pretend I'm Russell Mulcahy and we're filming your latest video." That was the energy this film needed, and even though it wouldn't have gotten us over the goal line, it would've helped.

Finally, this film was shot in Derby in the UK. Not a place I've ever been to--unless the tour bus I took on my high school trip to the UK went through there between Stratford-upon-Avon and York, but I wouldn't have even known--but I do have an interesting connection to there. At the Goodwill here in South Philly, I found a Derby County scarf. I've probably mentioned before on the site that I'm an Arsenal fan, which started in the mid-90s after the World Cup was here in the States and I became a world football fan, I really liked Dennis Bergkamp, and when I found out he played for Arsenal, that became my team. Anyway, all I really know about Derby is from their Premier League season when they had like 9 points, which might explain why the scarf ended up at Goodwill, South Philly's lone Derby County fan was so disgusted, they donated the scarf, and it sat there for ten years, in among more fashionable women's scarves because the people who worked at the Goodwill didn't know where else to put it, and where it was ignored, until I was there with my wife and happened to see it while she was looking through that section. Had I known going in that this was shot in Derby, I would've dusted it off for the occasion. I saw that they're back in the Championship for next season, and I think those games are on ESPN+ here in the States, so that'll give me a team to root for if I follow it at all.

And with that, let's wrap this up. It looks like this is still available on Freevee, so that may be a way to make it happen. For me, this is strictly for Van Damme completists, and only the hardest of the hardcore of them at that.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2040578/

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