Final Impact is a PM Entertainment flick with Lamas as an old fighter who loses a big match and opens a strip club/fighting ring after. When the Ohio State Champ, Michael Worth, shows up and wants him to train him, Lamas thinks this kid has what it takes to beat Jake, the guy that took him down years ago.
This is what I'm talking about right here. Maybe it could have used more fighting, but beyond that it's just a fun PM Entertainment flick. Lamas is great in the lead, Worth does his part as the young upstart, and Kinmont holds the whole thing together. At the same time, there's plenty of stuff you can get a kick out of, like Lamas's fight with Jake at the Neon Graveyard in Las Vegas; or even the idea of the oil wrestling/strip club/karate club that Lamas runs, which, to be honest would actually be kind of a cool idea if it weren't for the state boxing commissions and the fact that people could die if they got a bad concussion in one of the fights. Now I'm meandering and it's only the third paragraph.
We haven't seen DTVC Hall of Famer Lorenzo Lamas since 2012, and I don't know about you, but I've missed him. I was going through some of the old posts, and at one time he was second to Dolph with the most. While he's still one of only 6 actors in the 30 Club, he's now only tied with Rothrock for the fifth most. I think for an indication of why, we can go back to the last film of his we'd done, Mexican Gold aka Return of the Outlaws. He's all over the cover and barely in the film. And we were finding that a lot. Couple that with the fact that there were movies like this out there of his that I'd thought I'd already done--The Swordsman and its sequel Gladiator Cop also come to mind--and you can see how he stalled while someone like his co-star in this, Gary Daniels, blew past him and into the 40 Club with Dolph. Recently I was on the Jacked Up Review Show podcast with Cam Sully, and I put Lamas 10th on my list of top DTV stars, behind Adkins at 9. It's possible I need to rethink that, that I may have been hasty in having Adkins jump him so soon.
Speaking of Gary Daniels, he only has a small role in this, but when you combine it with smaller fighter roles by another Hall of Famer, Art Camacho, and PM Mainstay Ian Jacklin, the three together work as a kind of PM fighter showcase that was really fun to see. While this is going to go down as a tag for Daniels and Camacho, like I did with Rothrock in the Saber Raine review, it won't count as a film for them, so I won't push any films they've done with bigger parts down my queue. I was going to say that in the past that kept me from doing more films with Daniels in the lead, because I didn't want to do too much Daniels all at once, but the truth is he has the second most tags after Dolph, and Camacho has the third most, so it doesn't really matter. As long as I can find the films, I can do the reviews.
As I mentioned above, Kathleen Kinmont's part was the emotional glue that held things together, especially with Worth and Lamas. Nowadays we applaud someone who can take a low-budget script shot on the quick and do more with it--look at Vivica A. Fox's success with David DeCoteau's "Wrong" movies. I think when we look back at Kinmont's PM career, we find she was just as professional and maybe even endured more--her lovemaking scene with Wings Hauser in Art of Dying comes to mind, and I can see Fox or another actress saying "that's not happening." Coming back to her PM Entertainment films after my hiatus, I think she's one of their unsung heroes, and hopefully as more of these films become available to the various streaming services out there, her contributions will be better recognized.
Finally, with this movie, PM will have 35 reviewed on here, putting them only a few away from Cannon as a movie house--Millennium has even more at 61, but I'm not sure where to put them. For PM to pass Cannon in tags would be a huge feat though. It may also mean I need to consider adding in Pepin and Merhi to the Hall of Fame, considering I already have Golan-Globus and Roger Corman in there. It's a testament to what PM meant to the DTV action world in the late 80s/early-to-mid 90s, and how a site like this wouldn't have been possible without them.
But the site is here, so it's time to wrap up. Right now this is on Tubi and Prime. It looks like a full-screen transfer, which isn't the worst thing in the world--you get to remember what it was like before widescreen TVs. If you want, I still have an old 13" TV kicking around if you really want to have the full experience.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104267
No comments:
Post a Comment