Hard Vice (or "Hored Voyce" here in Philly), is a Joey Travolta directed and written vehicle that stars Sam Jones as jerk cop assigned to a vice case where a lady of the evening is offing her Johns. He's forced to work with vice cops Shannon Tweed, Miguel A. Nunez, and Tom Fridley. After some initial friction, they start to work well together, but as they dig deeper, will they like what they find? While this is going on, they cross paths with local crime lord Branscombe Richmond. How does he fit into all of this? Does he even at all? All of this leads to a bonkers ending that you'll never see coming.
Which of course leads us to a dilemma: how do we discuss this bonkers ending without giving it all away? We'll put a spoiler alert in the last paragraph and discuss it there. Before we get to that bonkers ending, we have something here that doesn't know what it wants to be, erotic thriller or hard boiled 90s actioner, and ultimately ends up being neither. I enjoyed a lot of the performances though, Sam Jones is sufficiently Sam Jones enough; Shannon Tweed is exactly the no-nonsense get it done cop that the shot of her on the cover indicates we're getting, and also in true Tweed style isn't diminished at all by any nude scenes she might have; and then Nunez and Fridley are great in supporting roles with them. The Richmond part is interesting, because I got the sense Travolta was introducing him here to put him in a second movie with the rest of the cast, the problem is his part feels like something that doesn't fit with the rest of the story, and kind of distracts from the proceedings, even if he does a great job with the part he has. This is pretty much that 90s premium cable late-nite banger that does well in a pinch when you have a bout of insomnia at 2am, but I don't know that it's something worth seeking out on its own.
In this film, Richmond is playing a Latin American gangster, which is one of many ethnicities he's played as an actor. The way Lorenzo Lamas said Reno Raines in Renegade was his Rocky, I think Richmond's Bobby Sixkiller was his best-known role as well, and that show wouldn't have been what it was without him. What's interesting here is, despite having a smaller acting part, he was also a second unit director, which was a role he had in another Joey Travolta film, Da Vinci's War. What I discovered is Richmond has also done a lot of stunt work too, some of which I hadn't credited before, including in films like Cobra and Road House, so I've added those in, getting him up to 13 tags, which makes this his 14th. While he may not quite have the CV to make it into the Hall of Fame, he's still one of the all-time DTV greats, and I think well-worth spotlight any time of the year, not just this month, so we'll see if we run into more of his movies in the near future.
Other than an almost blink and you miss it part in the Williamson flick Down n' Dirty, we haven't really seen Sam Jones since we've been back from hiatus, so it was good to get one of his films up again as well. He doesn't get to do a lot of the Sam Jones we enjoy though. In his opening scene, a perp is trying to escape in a pick-up truck, and Jones shoots at the gas tank, causing the truck to erupt into flames with the perp in it. Unfortunately the Jones we get through the rest of the film doesn't match that intensity. I think maybe I could've used less of him as a jerk early on, and more of him beating up baddies and blowing shit up. I think with Jones that's where the film's identity crisis hurt the most, because he spent more time going over paperwork than chasing down suspects while the film tried to figure out if it was an action movie or an erotic thriller. It reminded me a bit of the Wings Hauser PM movie Living to Die, where Wings got all of the things right that this film got wrong, and the result was Jones was left out to dry a bit.
This is our first time seeing Shannon Tweed on here in over ten years, when we did Steele Justice for Martin Kove's DTVC Hall of Fame induction post. I don't know how we went that long without more Tweed. I think the problem is we don't do enough of the erotic thriller on here, despite the fact that that was one of the genres that most got me into DTV movies, but because of that, we don't see Tweed as much as we should. It's a shame, because she really was a stalwart of the DTV world, so she should have more reviews, but one thing I've noticed is, a lot of her great 90s stuff isn't available to stream, and due to the adult content, often isn't on YouTube either. I think it's time some of these Blu-ray companies that are putting out DTV and cult action and horror flicks started looking at erotic thrillers too.
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As I mentioned above, the ending to this film is bonkers. What happens is, the killer is revealed, and they take Shannon Tweed hostage and run up to the roof of the Las Vegas hotel they're in, where Sam Jones confronts them, and a police helicopter is hovering overhead. The killer fires a handgun up at the helicopter, blowing it up; then Jones, his character a former baseball player, throws a baseball at the killer, knocking them off the roof of the building. What are we doing here with all this? Exploding helicopters? Baseballs thrown at killers, knocking them off roofs? One the one hand, we joke "no wonder Hard Vice 2 never came out," but on the other, I'm left wondering what kind of bonkers awaited us had that sequel been made? And what would it have been called, Harder Vice?
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And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently, you can get this on Plex and YouTube. I think this is more a good time killer when you're battling insomnia that you'd just run into while flipping through the dial than something worth seeking out; by the same token, there's an earnestness to the proceedings here from everyone involved, including Branscombe Richmond, who we're spotlighting in this post, that I think elevates this beyond the churn and burn approach to DTV films we've seen in the last ten years or so.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109987
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