Trouble Man (2025)

Even though Exit Protocol was Michael Jai White's 30th film on the site, because he's not in it much I wanted to do something more fitting for his 30 Club celebration, and I figured I'd take advantage of my current Starz subscription by reviewing this film, which he also directed. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof has covered this as well.

Trouble Man is not based on the Blaxploitation film of the same name, but rather has White as Jaxon, a former cop who runs security at Mike Epps's nightclub in Atlanta, while also doing jobs on the side, like beating up doctors who beat their wives. When singer La La Anthony goes missing, record mogul Orlando Jones enlists White's help, but there's stuff going on here that Jones isn't telling him. He gets a better sense of this when he goes to Anthony's boyfriend, Method Man, and the two of them start following up on leads. Levy Tran, a mysterious woman working with Jones, seems to be the key to all this, but when White and Method Man find where Anthony is being held, they discover how outgunned they are. It's going to take all their wits in addition to their brawn if they're going to prevail.

Overall I enjoyed this one. It took about 30 minutes or so to fully get what I think White was going for, which for me was a modern version of Fred Williamson's Dakota Smith films, but once we got there, especially when Method Man's character first appeared, it hits its stride. The question is, what do you do with that first 30 minutes? We get a lot of plot exposition and backstory dialog, a couple of comedic moments that could've been tighter, and a couple scenes of White beating the crap out of people, and that might be enough to get you to the last hour. The other thing is, when we finally get the big finale fight between White and Tran's two body guards (Noah Felder and Theodore Park), it's done with this janky-looking greenscreen in the background that detracts from it. I wonder if there was a way they could've mitigated that some, perhaps by shooting it in a different location if that was the issue. On that note though, I could feel more of the independent spirit in this production, as opposed to the assembly line feel we get with a lot of modern DTV, and to me that also has to count for something, especially when they're trying to overcome budgetary issues. If you have Starz and you're looking for some new DTV action to watch, this isn't a bad option.

Michael Jai White becomes the 12th actor in the 30 Club, which is a big deal and something that should've come sooner, considering how many DTV films has out there--by my count there are another 15 or 16 of his we could do, including MR 9: Do or Die, which Ty and I covered on the podcast. On the Vlad TV interview he did, talked about all of the challenges he's faced in the industry, which is something Fred Williamson has talked about as well, and I think you can see the parallels here with what Williamson did in the 80s and 90s, and with White producing and directing his own movies instead of waiting for the industry to give him the roles he should have. On that score, that's where that independent spirit really comes through in this film. Compared to Black Dynamite and Outlaw Johnny Black, this doesn't reach that level, but it does the trick for a solid direct to video action effort done on a budget, and I'd like to see more of these, especially with his character Jaxon.

Surprisingly this is our first Method Man film on the site, which, when I looked at his IMDb bio, isn't as surprising as I thought. Back in 2010 he did Sinners and Saints, and the trailer to that was on every third DTV film I got from Netflix to review for the site. In my head I assumed that was one of many, or would be one of many DTV films Method Man did, but not so it turned out. Either way, the moment he enters this movie, he breathes a life into it that it needed, and not the way I was expecting. I thought he'd be a run of the mill gangster character, but it was a well-rounded three-dimensional role that was a ton of fun, and he and White worked well off each other. It felt like White was trying to inject some humor into the film to cut a bit of the seriousness and mitigate some of the clichés this movie was working in, and Method Man fit perfectly with that, taking that edge off and allowing us to have fun with it all. I'm not sure how many more times we'll see him here, but based on this performance, hopefully this won't be the last.

Going back to that use of humor to cut some of the seriousness, it's easy with a detective film like this to make it all about how great the hero is, and if you make your baddies bad enough, it'll work, but I wonder too if White noticed it was becoming too much about his character being the man, which can make the whole thing seem like a silly vanity project if you're producing and directing too. To that end, the movie started off in that vein, when White beat up the abusive doctor. He makes this big show of "oh man, Ree Ree (Mike Epps), you didn't tell me how big this guy was!", only to have him take the guy down without the guy even landing a punch. Had that been Scott Adkins, the guy wouldn've been throwing him through plaster walls and Adkins would've barely prevailed by smashing a vase over his head or something, but that's not how White gets down, so the whole thing starts the movie on a bad foot, and I think had it continued that way, this might not have worked. I don't know if maybe he saw that happening too, and by injecting the humor in, we could laugh with the movie at both the jokes, and the clichés, as opposed to at them. I think that also allows us to take the effort of making the film itself more seriously, which I think is important when you're making movies on the margins like this.

Finally, look at that, it's Keith Sweat! He played himself producing La La Anthony's album, and he has songs in the movie! He's only in the one scene, which is too bad, it would've been nice if he helped raid the baddies' lair while toting a machine gun, or even just singing a few bars for us, but we'll take what we can get when it's Keith Sweat. I was trying to think what my favorite song of his is, and it probably has to be "Twisted," just because I remember that one on MTV a lot in the late 90s, but you look at "I Want Her," which is considered to be the first big New Jack Swing hit, and from there it's a string of hits and platinum records, so there are a lot of possible favorites. I watched the "Twisted" video as I was writing this review, and I'd forgotten about this trend from the late 90s to early 2000s where videos stopped the song at some point near the end, and either did a choreographed dance move, or in this case I'm not sure what it was. When I watch 80s and early 90s videos, we almost always just get the song, and when we don't, like in 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry," it's only a quick break that enhances the experience. Even the music itself, while "Twisted" is a favorite, it's more of that "heavy R&B" sound that had replaced New Jack Swing at that time, which guys as talented as Sweat could pull off, but there's something about it that wasn't as much fun as that New Jack Swing sound. Anyway, this was supposed to be a Keith Sweat appreciation paragraph, and it turned into a "get off my lawn" rant about music, so getting back to appreciating Mr. Sweat, here's to you, sir, you're one of the greatest.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Unfortunately this has been relegated to Starz purgatory, but if you have Starz it's worth checking out. The independent spirit of the film comes through, and the supporting performances of Method Man and others made this a fun time.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30459064/

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Deadly Breed (1989)

As we in the States celebrate 250 years of not wanting to be the middlemen when it came to colonial oppression and keeping all the profits to ourselves, I figured I'd celebrate in true DTVC style with PM Entertainment's 60th film on the site! And what a doozey, right? In addition to us, out of the five critic reviews on IMDb, three of them are Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett and Comeuppance, and Mitch at the Video Vacuum, so this is a Superfecta film.

Deadly Breed has William Smith as a police chief in full sit-down mode giving detective Kilpatrick (Addison Randall) the job of creating a neo-Nazi murder squad to kill black, Latino, and Asian parolees after they get out of prison, but making it look like the murders happened due to criminal activities so no one will be suspicious. After about 23 of his parolees have been killed though, PO Jake (Blake Bahner) does in fact get suspicious, so he starts digging--and digging, nights spent caressing his braided rat tail over Miller Genuine Drafts while his wife Lana (Michelle Berger) has to pleasure herself alone. Anyway, it's PM, somehow this resolves itself with a lot of explosions and death.

And as a PM movie, this is a rougher sit than we're used to. It would be number 4 on the spine if all the PM films were released as a collection, and while they were still getting a sense of what worked--like shootouts and explosions--they were also getting a sense of what didn't work--like the main character's significant other needing to die in some violent fashion. It also drags in parts, there isn't the PM 15-minute rule yet, the action is almost confined entirely to the end, with smatterings here and there before that. On the other hand, the PM over-the-top-ness (Stallone style) is pretty prevalent, with our neo-Nazi LAPD-led death squad not just harassing or beating people up, but straight-up massacring them. In a way that over-the-top-ness takes some of the sting out of it and makes it less sinister, as opposed to a bunch of masked Proud Boys on a DC subway surrounding a black woman, because there's a sense that the massacre couldn't really happen--but then we live in a 2026 where hate like this is so normalized that it's hard to know what could or couldn't happen. The other thing of course was the rampant racism in the LAPD, and while maybe a Mark Fuhrman wasn't massacring innocent victims, he did have Nazi paraphernalia at his police desk, and did a great job through his racism in creating reasonable doubt in the biggest trial in the last 50 years or so. I can imagine when PM made this in 1989, they couldn't have imagined a significant enough portion of the population today would see Kilpatrick as the hero, not the baddie. And for that, maybe this is the best PM film for the 4th of July in the US in 2026, it was over-the-top then, but notsomuch now. The fact that it's on Fawesome and loaded with commercials is probably fitting as well.

This is the big 6-0 for PM, and while we have better movies still to review that might have worked for a 60 Club celebration, for the 4th of July on America's 250th, I don't think anything was better than this, and in that sense perhaps this is the most fitting 60th post, because one thing PM was good at was reflecting America back at us with this distorted, over-the-top PM lens filled with cartoonish violence, but also baddies getting their comeuppance at the end of the 90 minutes. When a Trump-like figure played by William Shatner tried to gain office in Land of the Free, he didn't succeed and turn America into a White Christian Nationalist haven, he was vanquished by Jeff Speakman after the two duked it out. And here, despite Kilpatrick killing dozens of people, he does shimmy to death from Jake's assault rifle hose job instead of escaping and spreading his murderous hate further. In the real world, baddies not only don't get their comeuppance, they usually make a lot of money off of other people's suffering in the process. PM provided us with an escape that, in the 90s we needed, but in the 2020s, we need even more, so it's great that so many of their films are available in so many places for us to get that 90-minute reprieve. Here's to you Pepin, Merhi, and everyone else at PM who made these films happen, you were truly one of the greatest to ever do it.

Speaking of the people who made PM films happen, we have a lot of them here. Cole S. McKay is now at 68 films on the site, as he does stunts here, with Michael J. Sarna as stunt coordinator, who is now in the 30 Club himself! We also had Paul Volk doing the editing, who just celebrated a birthday, so happy birthday to him! Interestingly Rick Lamb does the cinematography, and while this is his only PM film as cinematographer, he did camera work on several others, plus some Albert Pyun and AIP films, so he's been on the DTVC numerous times. You could see his stamp in the early foot chase scene with the POV shots. This was directed by Charles T. Kanganis, one of six he did for PM, plus he wrote multiple other films for them, so someone we probably should tag at some point, but he was a real PM mainstay, especially in these earlier films of theirs. The same can be said about the film's baddie, Kilpatrick, played by Addison Randall. He's acted in, written, and directed multiple other PM flicks as well, plus City Lights movies. Finally, William Smith is back for his 12th film on the site, a true sit-down role  where he couldn't be bothered to tie his tie tightly or fix his hair. I think he stands maybe one time in the whole film, after police detective Alex (Rhonda Gray) comes in to ask if she can be part of the investigation into her brother's murder, and decorum insists that he has to at least stand to recognize her presence and what she's been through. It's a true thing of beauty.

The other PM mainstays, especially in early PM films like this, are McDonald's and Chinatown sightings. If only Smith had had a Bush 41 portrait in his office, we'd have hit the trifecta, which I don't think has ever happened in any movie on the DTVC before. The McDonald's is a shot of the Golden Arches while a guy is being followed, so we get it both through the windshield (or "windscreen" for my UK readers) and the rear-view mirror as he's looking behind him (sorry, not sure how to say "rear-view mirror" in UK English, "backward-facing looking glass"?). The Chinatown is the LA one we've seen in multiple PM films, and it's one I've never been to before, so maybe I need to make a pilgrimage. I saw that you could even walk to Dodger Stadium from there, and while I'm not sure what kind of walk that would be, I could check two items off of two lists with that, something I've actually done a few other times before, between the White Sox and Chicago's Chinatown, a Yankees game and Manhattan's Chinatown, and a Mets game and Queen's Chinatown. Too bad Pittsburgh doesn't have a Chinatown for when I go to that game later this summer.

Finally--I know that last paragraph felt like the finally--our hero in this movie had a tiny braided rat tail. When I first saw it, he was confronting his wife for using her vibrator because he was ignoring her with all his PO investigations, but I thought maybe it was a wire to an earpiece or a thread coming off his shirt. I should know better when I'm watching a movie from 1989, rat tails can appear out of anywhere, but my brain had moved so far beyond the concept of the rat tail over the last near-40 years that the idea of it is foreign again. After a few other shots of him though I was able to confirm that he did in fact have a small braided rat tail. If you're wondering, I did have a bit of one. I remember going to the Sears or JC Penny hair salon where my mom took me to get my hair done, and them showing me with a mirror in the back how it was coming along. The thing was, I got maybe 2-3 haircuts a year, most of the time I let my hair grow out, so there wasn't a lot of opportunity to make the contrast between the rat tail length and the actual length, and soon enough the rat tail was out and it didn't matter anyway. Normally I would do a "here's to you" thing about something like this, but there's no "here's to you" to the rat tail, just a good riddance.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this free on Fawesome, and on YouTube, which I've added to my PM Playlist on our YouTube channel. For a 4th of July 2026 PM film, it might not be the most fun, but it's the most apt. Also, warning if you're watching this in a group, there is a scene where Kilpatrick rapes and kills Lana, and while it's not entirely graphic, it is plenty disturbing. You could even click the 30 seconds ahead button a couple times and skip it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167873

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Exit Protocol (2025)

This is one that came out last year, I think, and there was a time in the early days of the site that a new Dolph would be big news, and I'd put everything aside to watch and review it once I got it from Netflix. We aren't in those times anymore, but when I saw we had a $1 rental deal with Xfinity, and my wife didn't use it for anything, I figured we'd take advantage and get this one in the can. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof has covered this--and gave a shoutout to our review of The Best Man in the process, so thanks for that!

Exit Protocol has Scott Martin (featured prominently on the tin) as an assassin who's all about two things: voiceovers and killing assassins who try to retire. I guess you can't have assassins retiring because they could tell on themselves and bring down the operation? But couldn't they do that when they're not retired? Anyway, Martin goes to kill Dolph, who has a pregnant girlfriend 35 years his junior, and after they each let each other live, they decide to team up against the guy who hired them (JB Yowell), but in the meantime, they have another great assassin, Michael Jai White, who needs to take them down too. Will our heroes make it out alive?

What do we do with this one? I think it has two major things working against it. One, the lead character isn't all that likeable. It's mostly the voiceovers, where he's giving these pithy monologues that either get us up to speed on various backstory elements, or gives us his opinion on the industry he decided to work in, but all just end up being indulgent jackassery--and to be fair, I don't know how you make those voiceovers come off in any way other than indulgent jackassery. So now I don't like the hero, but at least if there's some action that would be good, and while we do get some, there's also a lot of padding. We have opening credits padding, with this long, overdrawn out sequence of a bullet coming from far away to kill a mark, and on it's journey it travels through big block letters telling us everyone involved in the film. We have religious talk padding. We have twist ending padding. And perhaps worst of all, we have assassins making cute conversation padding, something that brings us back to the late 90s/early 2000s when everyone was trying to mimic Tarentino with their quirky loquacious hitmen. We do get more Dolph here, especially compared to his 2010s bait-and-switch jobs, and the addition of Michael Jai White is nice, and maybe all in all this isn't horrible for 2020s DTV Dolph, so maybe we should take what we can get and run; but on the other hand, so many of his better ones are on free streamers, so this is maybe more for completists like me, and only if you can get a deal, otherwise wait for it to be on a free streamer or part of a streamer you already subscribe to.

This is number 76 for Dolph at the DTVC. That's right, we're almost at 80 for him, and we should be able to get there, as we have three DTV films left to review, Fat Slags (which I've been warned against repeatedly), Sharknado V (which he's barely in, but it still counts), and Hellfire, the new one directed by Isaac Florentine (which was Michael Jai White's character name in this) that I may watch with the next $1 coupon I get; and then he has a David AR White movie and the third One Shot movie in the can, both of which should be out this year. When we started the site in 2007, he wasn't even 50 yet, and now he'll be 69 (hey-oh!) this fall. (That also means when we turn 20 next year, he'll turn 70, so if we starred in one of his movies he'd date us! (Hey-oh! again)) As I said above though, for a late era Dolph bait-and-switch, we've seen a lot worse in terms of his screen time. Yes, Scott Martin has the most screen time, so it's not like this is a Dolph lead role--and we may never see that again, these take what you can get kinds of deals may be all we get at this stage in his career, and I guess for a take what you can get, we've done a lot worse.

Back when Dolph was only in his early 50s, I created what I called the Bronson Death Wish V standard for an action lead's shelf live. Bronson was 73 when that came out (71 when it filmed in 1993), and the idea was, unless you're Bronson, you probably should consider donning that sombrero, hopping on that mule, and riding off into the sunset before that--at least when it comes to doing action films. And the thing is, it wasn't only Dolph in his early 50s then, Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Cynthia Rothrock, Michael Dudikoff, Christopher Lambert, and Lorenzo Lamas were all in that age group, plus Seagal was a little older, and Van Damme and Gary Daniels were a little younger--what I'm trying to say is, in the late 2000s there was a sense that we were a long ways from the Bronson Death Wish V standard for all of these names, but now we're here. Hell, even this film's other Hall of Famer, Michael Jai White, will be 60 next year himself, and we thought of him as one of the young guys! The question then is, do we need a new standard? If anyone could create one, it's Dolph. We had the Death Wish remake in 2018, could we skip ahead to a Death Wish V remake in 2030 with Dolph at the helm? He already has his Lesley-Anne Down in Charlotte Kirk, they're roughly the same age gap. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Fred Williamson before I wrapped this paragraph, who is still kind of pumping things out in his 80s, but doesn't really have his Death Wish V I don't think.

Scott Martin joins a list of actors who starred in movies where Dolph was featured prominently on the tin, but not in the film. The best comp here might be Riot, where Dolph and Chuck Liddell are on the cover, but Matthew Reese was the star. At least here though, Scott Martin's name is on the cover too. The most notorious is Ambushed with Daniel Bonjour (hello!), and I think you can also draw a comp to that and this with Martin's voiceover jackassery making him an unlikeable character, even if Bonjour's character was even worse--Martin's character has a bit of a redemption arc in the last 30 minutes that Bonjour's never approached. Looking at Dolph's IMDb bio, I'd say he's had maybe 15 or 16 of these kinds of movies since 2010, and the two movies that buck the trend the most are Castle Falls and Wanted Man, two films he directed. We also had Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and One in the Chamber in 2012 that I enjoyed, but they're at the early end of this trend. There are factors that contributed to this, like his age, which we talked about earlier; or his personal life, he got divorced in 2011, and movies like this mean quick cash. I don't know if we count Altitude among these, because unlike these others, it made pretty clear from the cover that Denise Richards was the lead, but that seems to be the key, get another name lead we recognize to do most of the work--and cut out the voiceovers!--and you may have something that works well enough.

Finally, technically we hit a milestone here for our film's other Hall of Famer, Michael Jai White, but because he's in this even less than Dolph, I figured I'd do a better film for him for his official 30 Club entry. I did consider holding off on reviewing this until we got that better White film reviewed first, but I think that might be overdoing it with these tags and clubs, if his milestone post is movie 31 or 32, we're still celebrating him. By my count he's the 12th actor to make 30 films on the site, which makes it pretty exclusive and worth celebrating when the time comes--which will be soon, there are a couple on Starz that I need to do, so we can grab one of those. In the meantime, before we do the full celebration, here's to you Mr. White, you're truly one of the greats.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of my writing this, rent VOD is the only way to go. If you're a Dolph completist like me, I'd still only do it if you get a coupon for a free rental somewhere, otherwise wait until it's on a free streamer or one you subscribe to. If you're not a Dolph completist, tread at your own risk--again, he has a ton of stuff on Tubi and other free streamers that are more fun.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32421438/

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Under Fire (2025)

This is one Ty and I did on the podcast, back in February on episode 250, and we both had a good time with it, so I figured I'd review it here and give it some more love. Considering it only has six critic reviews on IMDb, it looks like it could use all the love it can get.

Under Fire has Mason Gooding as an under cover DEA agent working with border patrol agent Odette Annable--whom he's also dating--to take down a big Mexican drug kingpin. He's deep undercover, and thinks Dylan Sprouse is a mid-level dealer that's his in with the kingpin. What he doesn't know is Sprouse is also undercover, only he's an FBI agent, and he thinks Gooding is his in with the kingpin. It all comes to a head when they're about to make a big deal, and as they go for the bust, they each reveal who they are. That's probably enough to open a buddy cop series, which would've been a fun time, but a sniper hiding in the hills has other plans. He's taking people out left and right, leaving our heroes pinned down behind a couple parked cars. Now they have to leave their animosity behind and work together to get out of this. But the question is, who sold them out to the sniper in the first place?

As I said above, this was a pretty good time. Gooding and Sprouse have great chemistry, and they work well in this kind of dynamic. From there, I think the film does a good enough job of keeping a plot like this from becoming stale, which is something another film with a similar paradigm, Take Cover, struggled with. Part of that was Sprouse and Gooding, but it was also the creative ways the story led our characters to try new things to get out of their situation, and either succeed, or fail but at least advance the proceedings so we didn't feel like we were spinning our wheels. Then at the end we get some great Dylan Sprouse Fu when he confronts the baddie. If you're looking for some fun newer action, and you have Hulu, this is a good way to spend 90 minutes.

We last saw both Gooding and Sprouse in Aftermath, which also wasn't bad, but it felt like this allowed them to bring more personality to their roles, which they were more than able to do. The problem unfortunately is we have the current DTV ecosystem that's all about loading the movie with older actors that once had a big name so they can be splashed on the tin, and there isn't as much room for younger names like theirs to have opportunities like this; or they get their opportunity, but because it doesn't have one of those older names attached with a 5-page sit-down role, it doesn't get the eyes on it it should, and something that's a lot of fun like this ends up with only six critic reviews. My solution to this is a buddy cop movie starring Sprouse and Gooding, with Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin, John Malkovich, and Morgan Freeman as baddies that our heroes have to overcome. Then you can splash those guys on the cover, give them each their five pages of script with only one filming location, but then the movie gets 20 or 30 critic reviews and the world gets to see what Gooding and Sprouse can do. It could even be called Geezer Teaser as a play on the trend. It looks like they both have other stuff in the can, which is good, but hopefully soon they'll be teamed up again, maybe in a sequel to this.

This employs another recent DTV trend, the one location movie. It's like DTV producers and studios are looking for scripts that either mostly take place in one location, or can be turned into that. I get it, from a cost standpoint it makes sense, but from a movie standpoint it usually requires a lot of padding, often in the form of flashbacks or non-linear storytelling to mitigate the fact that the bulk of the film is only happening in one place. While this isn't a new thing, in the past I think it was more commonly done by reusing sets, so at least the film felt like we weren't in the same location the whole time, but the budget was saved by not needing to recreate these places from scratch, they could just reuse sets that were used in another bigger budget film--or maybe a few different DTV films. This new trend feels more cynical, similar to the other modern DTV movie trends, so it's nice to have a film like this that mitigates the challenges of shooting in one location in a more creative, organic way, which removes a lot of that cynicism. I don't know that we'll see more like this, but I hope we do, because I can't imagine the one location trend is going away anytime soon.

The first major plot point of this movie reveals an issue with federal policing in the US, and that is that we have too many agencies that overlap, wasting taxpayer money. Why do we have an FBI, DEA, ATF, and DHS? Why not make them all departments under the FBI? I think we know the answer: they're all created to have their own budgets, so they can all use taxpayer money to buy back military surplus and engage in their own no-bid contracts with companies that pay off or are invested in by various politicians. Also Trump was able to break ICE off and make them his own secret police much more easily due to the fact that they were already under DHS, itself a broken off government entity. And we see here, we'd have no movie if they all worked under one organization, Gooding and Sprouse would have one boss to report to that would handle drug trafficking and they'd know each other--like how if we had universal healthcare in the US, all the former thieves who need to do one last job to pay for a relative's surgery wouldn't have that reason anymore. The dysfunctionality baked into our government which is there to enrich the lives of billionaires and the politicians they pay off has been giving screenwriters material for decades. Would you call that making lemonade out of lemons? And why do we need to make lemonade out of lemons? Lemons are great in beverages, great to squeeze onto salads, I have a great recipe for linguine and asparagus that involves lemons--so many great things you can do with lemons besides making lemonade, why is that an expression?

Finally, getting back to the lack of critic reviews on IMDb, when you look at the page, there are also only 11 photos, of which 10 are various cover images, so no one really put any effort into marketing this. I want to say, what are you doing Voltage Pictures, or whoever else are producing and distributing these films, why aren't you reaching out to us in the movie blogging world and having us review your new releases, but then I think of the volume of screener emails I get, and how much time I have to do them, and realize maybe this still would've sat until now even if someone reached out to me directly to review it. Maybe, but maybe not, and I can think of five or six other sites off the top of my head that also would've covered this too, and with its availability on Hulu, we would've given this a more robust presence on there and IMDb. We can be here to champion these movies for you, otherwise you're left to the whims of the IMDb user reviews, of which you'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. Yes, some of my older reviews aren't the nicest either, but over time I think I've been fairer and more understanding of the time and work that goes into making any movie. All it takes is a simple email, and we're happy to help. We love these movies and want to see them succeed.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this as part of your Hulu subscription, which I think is a good deal. It's a fun time, one of the better movies Ty and I have covered in our two-movie episodes of the podcast. Speaking of which, the episode we covered this on was number 250 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32212611

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

The Driver (2019)

In our goal of getting Mark Dacascos into the 30 Club by the end of the year, and in my attempt to take advantage of the cheap Starz subscription I've got right now, and considering I'd been meaning to do this one for a while anyway, I figured it was time to finally make it happen. Also, the screenplay was written by a fellow Pear Tree, so I have to support that. 

The Driver has DTVC Hall of Famer Mark Dacascos as "The Driver," also known as "Dad," a guy with a certain set of skills who works as the driver and head of security for a small community of people who have barricaded themselves against the zombie apocalypse. When things go sideways, The Driver has to escape with his daughter Bree (Noelani Dacascos). His plan is to take her to a place called "Haven," a possible myth, but also a possible safe zone where more humans are living away from the zombies. The thing working against him: he's been bitten, and only has so much time before he turns. This means he needs to take as much advantage of the time he has left to show his daughter how to take care of herself after he's no longer there.

This is Wych Kaos at his most Kaos-ian, which I think contributes to the low IMDb user rating despite me enjoying it. It's got action elements, it's got zombie elements, but then it has this human drama element that Kaosayananda really wants the movie to be about, and I don't even know that he wants to package the human element inside a zombie actioner, I think this is how he wants the movie to be. And the thing is, it all worked for me, but I think that's because I'd been seeing more of his work, not only as a director but a cinematographer, where I think he really earns his money, and I think because of that I have a better sense of how he wants to make a movie. The thing is though, how do you package that? You have Mark Dacascos in a great performance, but he's known for his next-level martial arts ability, not for acting opposite his real life daughter and playing a father who knows he's going to die soon and is teaching her how to shoot a gun. I think if people know going in that there's some of the Mark Dacascos action star, but overall it's more a dramatic role, at the very least fans of his would watch this and appreciate what he, Kaos, and everyone else were trying to do, and even if that's a slim audience, sometimes it's about making the movie you want to make and letting the audience come to it instead of thinking about the audience ahead of time. (Easy for me to say though, I'm not dealing with the savage reviews on IMDb after putting myself out there.)

We're now at 27 films for Mr. Dacascos, and out of those, this doesn't reach the highs of a Drive or Crying Freeman, and I'd probably put something like Sabotage above it too--though we get a callback to that movie when Dacascos is showing his daughter how to shoot with a scope, and he tells her to keep it away from her to avoid the "idiot cut"--but I thought his performance was a better realization of what he and Kaos were going for in One Night in Bangkok. Kaos really leans on Dacascos to make this movie work, and the sense I got in watching him was that Dacascos relished the opportunity to be leaned on like that. The other thing I thought he did a good job of was divorcing himself from his character, even though he was acting opposite his real life wife and daughter. There were moments where he had to pull from that reservoir to get the emotion he needed out, but this character is not exactly a good guy, and as the movie unfolds his humanity is revealed, which wins us over, but it's a strange alchemy that we don't generally get in a movie like this, and Dacascos had to work to walk that tightrope to make it a success. As I said above, if you're a fan of Dacascos you need to see this, and while it may not be a favorite, you'll at least appreciate the performance.

This is the fourth film Wych Kaosayananda's directed that we've reviewed on the site, with another three films of his that he was cinematographer as well, and I think it's that acumen as a cinematographer that makes his films so interesting. There are moments where he's literally telling the story through his cinematography, which is something I picked up on more here than in the other films of his I've watched, and like One Night in Bangkok, Dacascos is good at performing in these scenes where there isn't any dialog, and Kaos is using his cinematography to advance the plot. I went back to my reviews of the other three directed films of his we've covered, which in addition to One Night in Bangkok are Tekken 2 and Zero Tolerance, and I found that I wasn't as hard on them, especially the latter two, as I'd thought, so maybe by this fourth one I was primed to watch his movies and understand better his unique perspective to filmmaking. 

Another interesting element to this film is it was supposed to be the third film of a planned trilogy, of which the first film, Paradise Z, came out a year later, and the second film, The Rider, hasn't been shot yet, and isn't even listed as an in development credit for him on IMDb. What that means is, at the end when he's tying the three films together, because we're watching this out of order, it creates a deus ex machina moment as the characters from the other movies step in to help out the current characters when all hope appears to be lost, because we've never seen them before. I almost think it's more Kaos that they're out of order than if they'd been filmed and released in the order they were supposed to be. Eventually I'll see Paradise Z, and hopefully someday The Rider will be produced as well, because this first one was compelling, and I'd like to see how the rest of it plays out.

Finally, I mentioned in the first paragraph that a fellow Pear Tree wrote the screenplay for this, that's because my last name, Poirier, is French for Pear Tree, and the screenwriter for this was Steven Poirier. According to IMDb the only two films he's written are this and Paradise Z. In his IMDb bio, he said he's descended from Acadian French who came to Nova Scotia from France in the 17th century, and I had recently done some research on my lineage and discovered I too was descended from Acadian French who came here in the 17th century, only my line moved to Quebec in the 18th century. Wonders never cease, but it's great to see a Poirier making it happen.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is currently in Starz Purgatory, but hopefully it'll be back on Tubi soon. I think if you're a Dacascos fan, this is worth checking out, you'll appreciate it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9272568

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

The Big Fall (1997)

For this month's PM post, I figured I'd do the third of three films C. Thomas Howell did with them, having already done the first two. When you look at all the names included too, you can see why a review was needed. In addition to us, Matt Spector at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, and David Wain at The Schlock Pit have covered this as well.

The Big Fall has Howell as Blaise Rybeck, a private investigator with a big heart who's having trouble making ends meet, despite having a nice big office, an office assistant (Kathy Griffin), and an intern (Sam Seder). All that changes when beautiful possible femme fatale Emma (Sophie Ward) comes to Rybeck asking her to find her brother, who disappeared while flying a light plane. Turns out he was involved with some rough characters, including Jeff Kober and Titus Welliver, but as Howell gets in deeper, he starts to realize maybe Emma isn't who she said she is, and maybe she's more involved with them than he thought. Then, as if we didn't have enough players, a young FBI agent who has a past with Howell is now assigned to take them down too. Will Howell solve the crime and get out alive?

This is an interesting one compared to the other two Howell did for PM. It flows back and forth between what we expect to be a PM Entertainment film, with explosions and people crashing through glass windows, but they feel shoehorned into Howell's attempt at a neo-Noir that leans heavily on more classic Film Noir themes. Like in the first ten minutes, we get these well-shot, stylized scenes of Howell smoking a cigar at an exclusive club while flirting with Kelly Rutherford, which then bleeds into a fight scene, car crashes, and Howell falling off a roof and crashing through a window. But then we don't see as much action for longer stretches than we're used to in a PM flick, and in the struggle between PM elements and neo-Noir, the latter wins out mostly. Also some of the PM elements don't feel as great, like the car chase later in the film where the cinematography wasn't what we usually get on PM action scenes, and was shot to make the thing feel a bit claustrophobic. There are some things for this to hang its hat on though. Howell actually bungee jumps. He also has a fight scene with Titus Welliver, which is something I feel like I'd want if I see their two names on the tin. And then we get these other names, like Kathy Griffin, Sam Seder, and Jeff Kober, who, along with Welliver, add a little more flavor, as did the one-off scene with Rutherford, and Sophie Ward as our Film Noir femme fatale. This is probably more for PM completists, but because I consider myself one, I think this is worth checking out on a free streamer.

We're now at 17 films for C. Thomas Howell, which feels like a good number, plus we have a couple we discussed on the pod that I could review soon, so that number could go higher. A lot of his tags came in the first few years of the site, when he had teamed up with The Asylum and was making War of the Worlds movies with them. It wasn't until later when Kenner from Movies in the Attic told me to watch The Sweeper that I discovered his PM Entertainment oeuvre, and while I didn't like this one as much as that or Pure Danger, I think these three work better than his Asylum output. Even this one is trying things that I don't know if The Asylum would've let him try, and while it may not always fit for PM, I appreciated that he had the room to do it, because when it did work, like the scene with Kelly Rutherford, I thought it worked really well. In my review of Mutant Vampire Zombies from the 'Hood! I said that Howell just didn't click for me, but I think seeing his PM films I have a new perspective, so it'll be interesting to see how he goes from here. Also this is his fifth directed film on the site, which isn't a bad number either. 

Denney Pierce is the action director for this movie. If you're not familiar with him, he does a lot of work with Spiro Razatos, especially stunt driving, and so like Razatos, he's a big part of why a lot of the PM films we love so much are great, but also why so many 2010s big budget action movies were great. I thought he did well as action director here, despite the fact that the film didn't have a lot of scenes for him to work with. Also, Igor Meglic, who is Razatos's action DP, wasn't on this either, instead we had Clive Sacke as second unit DP, and Jürgen Baum, who himself had done a lot of second unit DP work, as cinematographer. I'm not saying they did a bad job, but I think it may have explained why the chase scene near the middle didn't look the way we expect a PM action scene to look. And I think you can also say that about Jürgen Baum as cinematographer, he did a good job, but because he's not Richard Pepin or Ken Blakey, the film didn't have as much of the PM feel we've come to expect, and in that sense this movie feels more like one of the PM films Pepin and Merhi distributed, as opposed to one they produced in house. Probably not a selling point as a film on its own, but almost 60 PM flicks in, seeing some of these unique elements becomes more interesting the more of these we watch.

In the second screenshot you may recognize that young man as Sam Seder, host of The Majority Report YouTube channel, which was originally on Air America (or still is on that too, if that still exists, I'm not sure anymore). While I don't watch The Majority Report, it gets pushed to me a lot, and I do remember its early days when he co-hosted with Janeane Garofalo. The fact that the show has lasted this long, and has navigated all of the changes in the media landscape in that time, is quite a feat, and now it looks like it's thriving on YouTube. It's strange though, when you look at his four box on IMDb, The Big Fall isn't listed among them. To quote Jillian Michaels when he was debating her, "Come on Sam!"--or rather, instead of debating, she was looking things up on ChatGPT and reading off the answers to him as a form of rebuttal. As great as anything is you've done, or are going to do, getting shot by Jeff Kober in a drive-by and crashing through the plate glass window of a café will always be the tops. Even if a stunt man did it, it was your character, and you developed him to the point that we really felt it when you were lying there close to death, and Howell put a hand on your character's mother's shoulder and told her you were going to pull through. Even if you don't appreciate it, The Big Fall will always be part of your four box in my heart.

Finally, Sophie Ward didn't look all that comfortable smoking cigarettes in this movie. It reminded me of when we see younger actors do it today, because they didn't grow up around smoking, so it's not a natural thing for them. It'll be interesting to watch as we get further away from the generations that were comfortable smoking, how we'll be able to make period pictures. It's like the young Millennial women speaking in vocal fry while on dates with Don Draper on Mad Men. At some point though, us who grew up with smoking, during a time when parents smoked while tying their two-year-old's shoes as they sat in their stroller, while their friends came over to chat with them and smoked too, will die off, and the only people left will be people who are unfamiliar with it, kids who grew up with hipster parents that act like they're older than they are, and kind of don't remember a time when smoking was prevalent either, despite saying they do. In 2035 when the newly Netflix-owned HBO Max (after they bought it off Paramount+ when Oracle had to sell it off when ChatGPT couldn't pay to lease the data centers they built for them, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in the process) decides to reboot The Wire, are kids who were born in 2002 going to be able to look like Dominic West when they smoke? (And yes, I'm assuming they'll make it a period piece because Y2K will be so in then.)

This is going off the rails, so I better wrap it now. You can get this free on Amazon, I think even if you don't have Prime. There's also a version on YouTube that's not as great quality, but it'll do in a pinch, and you can find that in my PM playlist on my YouTube channel. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115677

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Hunt Club (2022)

This was covered on episode 232 of the DTVC Podcast, back on October 14, when Ty and I did our Mickey Rourke double feature, "Rourke to Oblivion," and with Casper Van Dien, I figured it needed a review on here too. In addition to us, Chad Cruise at Bulletproof has covered this as well.

Hunt Club features Mena Suvari as Cassandra, a mother whose daughter disappeared. After a chance meeting with Tessa (Maya Stojan), a woman with a specific set of skills, they track the daughter's last known location to party a bunch of rich men throw on a remote island on a lake in the woods. Cassandra infiltrates the party while Tessa sneaks onto the island by raft, and soon both discover that this "party" is a bunch of Men's Rights douchebags who keep women captive, then hunt them in a sick game. Among the hunters we have old timer Carter (Casper Van Dien), who is trying to break in his son Jackson (Will Peltz), Virgil (Mickey Rourke), and brothers Preston and Teddy (Jeremy and Jason London). These men all think they're just going to have another fun hunt, but once Cassandra connects up with Tessa, they'll make this a hunt those guys won't forget--because they'll be dead. (See what I did there?)

There were some fun aspects to this, but I think it fell victim to the classic "only enough material for an episode of a syndicated TV show" issue. If we had a syndicated TV series where Suvari and Stojan went around the country taking down criminal operations like this, this would be a perfect 42-minute episode. Instead, because this needs to be 87 minutes, there's this delay where Stojan is taking her time getting to the island and putting away her raft, while some of these young women are getting killed. And this is a pretty rough way to go, be held captive for weeks on end in some barn, and then die a violent death in the woods after some guys hunt you down. That's not a simple horror movie kids having sex in a parked car getting hacked up by Jason kind of kill, that's pretty dark stuff, and to have people dying while our heroes are taking their time getting their shit together is kind of off-putting. When Stojan and Suvari's characters decided to kick it in high gear, it delivers a bit more on what its premise promises, and we get some nice kills, which I appreciated. I liked what they were going for here, and I think in a lot of ways they were successful, I just wish there would've been some more urgency among the main characters while the other women were getting killed off.

I thought we'd start with our two leads, Mena Suvari and Maya Stojan, because I thought they were both great. We'd seen Suvari on the podcast before, back when Jamie and I did Don't Blink on episode 27, but this is her first time on the site. I really liked her interplay with Will Peltz, where she's playing the more mature woman and wrapping him around her finger, and I think they could've leaned into that more and had her not get caught by the baddies herself, but rather find the girls on her own and break them out--and it was almost like they had her get caught by them both to pad out that portion of the film, and to have an excuse to, as the Brits would say, "get her kit off," which for me the whole thing betrayed the character they were building with her. For Stojan, we've actually seen her before, when we did the indie screener for Case 346. Unlike Suvari's character, who has this nuance of the grieving mother, Stojan's is pure badass, but again, the story construct betrayed that badassness, because we're like "when is Stojan going to save these other women?" while she's putting her raft away and they're getting shot by crossbows and stepping in bear traps. Also unlike Suvari, where this kind or role seems more like a one-off, I feel like we could have a lot more Stojan-led DTV actioners, which I would love to watch if they ever got made.

The other two big names familiar to the DTVC are Casper Van Dien and Mickey Rourke, and both were a lot of fun as baddies. For Van Dien, this is his 10th film on the site, which feels low for him, but I think that's because he's someone where I see a bunch of stuff of his I want to review, but don't get around to it. By all accounts, he should be in the 30 Club by now, and he's not even close, so maybe I can try to make a better effort to fix that. Like in Most Dangerous Game, he's a great baddie, he knows the assignment, and he delivers every bit of it. Every time we see him though it's a reminder that we need to get more of his stuff up, and hopefully I'll do that in the future. Rourke on the other hand is exactly the modern Rourke you expect. He's just a good actor giving the movie what it wants when they get him on board and give him a few pages of script to do--or in this case maybe he has a little more. This is only his seventh film on the site, but unlike Van Dien where that number is low, for Rourke it feels a bit higher, and a big part of that is he's in a lot of movies with bigger names on the site like Dolph and Michael Jai White, and I imagine because of that we'll see him a lot more in the future too.

Do you remember on the Cave Dwellers episode of MST3K? Especially the part where Ator and the female lead are about to be sacrificed to the snake god along with one other guy they had with him and a bunch of fair maidens the long-haired John Saxon guy brought. His friend Thong sneaks in to rescue them, but by the time he gets to Ator all the fair maidens and the guy have been sacrificed, and at one point I think it's Joel who says "geez, Gomez is taking his sweet time," and then there's a joke about padding. The movie's saying these fair maidens don't matter, it's only important for Thong to save Ator. Another example of this is in American Ninja 4, where everyone's about to be burned at the stake, when Dudikoff shows up to rescue them, but, again, is taking his sweet time, and in the process, one of the soldiers is burned alive. This movie has the same kind of issue with the women being hunted and killed while Stojan is taking her time stashing her raft on the island. It doesn't do anything to help the movie, and if anything hurts the perception of our heroes. I know filmmakers all know a lot more about movie making than I do, but as a fan of films and someone who likes to watch them, my piece of advice is, watch Cave Dwellers, and then don't do anything they do in that movie, and you should be in good shape.

Finally, this was directed by Elizabeth Blake-Thomas, and even though it was written by two men (one of whom, David Lipper, also played one of the hunt club guys), I think her direction de-male gaze-ified it, so to speak. Recently Jon and I discussed a movie called Private Obsession for an upcoming podcast episode, where Shannon Whirry is held captive by the 90s equivalent of a Men's Rights douchebag, and most of the movie is her being mentally tortured and starved and whatnot, but then in the last five minutes she turns the tables on him, and there's this sense on filmmaker Lee Frost's part of "hey, see, I don't agree with this stuff because I had the guy get his comeuppance." Blake-Thomas for the most part divorces the movie from that concept, there isn't a tone of a guy filmmaker getting off on seeing a woman mistreated like this, but then thinking he's distancing himself from it by turning the tables at the end. I think that's why the part in the early middle where women are getting killed while Stojan is stashing her raft was so off-putting, because it betrayed the rest of what the movie was doing, at least for me. I think as this Manosphere concept grows, and people try to make sense of it with endless op-eds about why modern men are so disaffected, having voices that cut through that bullshit will be that much more important, and what I appreciated here was when Stojan's character finally joins the party it became the movie I was hoping it would be. When I was in undergrad, I wrote a paper about how the Taliban's restrictions on women were used to keep the overall population in Kabul under their thumb, and my professor told me "you didn't discuss at all how the women involved feel about this," and I think that's often what happens when we have these "commentaries" on toxic attitudes, whether it's chauvinistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., people spend too much time on the people with the horrible attitudes, and less on how the people who are targets of that animosity feel; and this film, at least when it gets going, does a better job of that, and hopefully we'll see more of that in the future.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Tubi here in the States. I think the runtime, the performances, and the way the story ultimately resolves itself is worth a watch, even if I think it would've worked better if we'd been able to see the heroes get after it sooner. And if you haven't yet, you can check out the Rourke to Oblivion podcast episode Ty and I did where we discuss this, number 232 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21220802

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.