Bad Bizness aka More Mercy (2003)

This is a film I'd been looking to do for a long time, as I'm trying to get as many Albert Pyun films reviewed on the site as I can. Finally it made its way to Tubi, under the alternate title More Mercy, so I was on it. In addition to us, our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has covered this, so you can go to his site to see what he thought as well.

Bad Bizness stars Traci Bingham as a hotel detective at a resort in Bali where women are being murdered. Call women, women of the night, moonlighting models, Bingham's not sure what the connection is, but there is a connection. Her boss, Norbert Weisser, would just as soon sweep this under the rug, as would his boss, Master P, so they give Bingham and her partner, Brent Huff, a shot at finding out who did it before they have to call in the Bali police and the whole thing goes sideways. In order to find out who this killer is, Bingham needs to delve into the seedy world of female surf magazines and the photographer/madam who runs them. All fingers point to a sleezy ponytailed rich guy with a soul patch as the killer, but something tells us the viewer that's just too easy...

When I first started the site, I called this The Direct to Video Connoisseur as this tongue-in-cheek concept evoking an image of an Alistair Cooke-type watching Dolph Lundgren action flicks while wearing a robe and ascot or something. After watching this film though, I began to feel like I was becoming a real connoisseur of sorts. Seeking out a movie simply because Albert Pyun started it and Jim Wynorski finished it, it's like discovering a movie Scorsese started and Spielberg finished; or Kurosawa started and Bergman finished. And ultimately that's the value this movie has now, almost 20 years later. The movie itself doesn't have a lot of mystery, but it seems like there's a lot of mystery surrounding the production: when did Pyun stop and Wynorski take over? Why did Pyun stop in the first place, was he fired or did he quit? A Fred Olen Ray film, Final Examination (which I haven't seen yet) was filmed in the same location around the same time, shares a lot of the same cast, and also has Pyun as a producer. Is there a connection? Was Pyun supposed to film that too? Information online is scant, so it would be interesting to learn more if we can.

Beyond all of that, this thing is pretty low budget, and doesn't always make a lot of sense beyond the love scenes. There's a strip club, but it's in a theater where you might see a play, so the woman dances on the stage, and the men sit in the audience. The changing room for said strip club is a restaurant bathroom. Master P literally phones in all of his scenes from a Las Vegas hotel room, in a role that would have made Eric Roberts and Bruce Willis proud. And speaking of hotels, the one that this one takes place in looks suspiciously like it's in Hawaii instead of Bali. But at the same time, there are elements that make this a bit more fun 20 years later. Julie K. Smith is a great addition as a lesbian woman whose partner is killed by the serial killer. Traci Bingham is exactly the kind of strong female lead, especially a woman of color, Pyun would center his movie around; but she's also the kind of strong female lead Wynorski would want in one of his soft core boob fests, and I like that he teases us with that side without ever fully giving it to us, as Bingham remains fully-clothed and doesn't have a full love scene--and why does she need to, when we've got Julie K. Smith to do the honors. Even the fact that a sleazy guy with a ponytail and a soul patch plays on our 90s sensibilities of what bad is so much that we have to think he's the killer helps to make this a fun ride. But I think you also have to be a certain kind of viewer to have fun with it like that, as this isn't for everyone.

While Albert Pyun is now listed as having 44 tags, he only has 43 films, because we did Mean Guns a second time (at his request). We don't have many left to do at this point. I was finally able to track down Raven Hawk online, and then Cool Air and Left for Dead are available to rent; plus we have the aforementioned Final Examination that he produced. There are two others that he released in the 2010s, The Interrogation of Cheryl Cooper and Interstellar Civil War. I can't find a way to watch the latter, but it looks like through Pyun's site I can rent the other one. That still would put him just shy of the 50 Club, but even without that, he's by far the most tagged director on the site. There are definitely directors like Wynorski and Ray who have the output available to catch him, but I'd have to be doing this site for years more for anyone to get near 40 movies like him--I think Ray has the second most of a director with 15, so that means he's almost 30 behind Pyun. That gives us a sense of just how big Pyun has been for the DTVC, a legacy that will never be surpassed.

Jim Wynorski is one, on the other hand, who we haven't seen as much on the DTVC, but hopefully that'll change soon. He's credited in this film under the name Bob E. Brown, which could be a reference to the R & B singer and member of New Edition; the hair metal video vixen (my favorite of which is Hurricane's "I'm Onto You"); or even the former American League baseball president. I think part of the reason why Pyun has so many tags, and someone like Wynorski so few, is Pyun worked with a lot of big names, and the names tend to make movies move up in my review queue, so he got a bit of a head start because his films overlapped more with how the site evolved in the late 2000s-early 2010s. Now that we've exhausted most of Pyun's filmography, where Wynorski may have room to get more films in, we have directors like Jesse V. Johnson and Isaac Florentine eating up some of that space. When I look at Wynorski's filmography, it's really just the names that make the difference, because otherwise he has a lot of movies that belong here--and one feather he has in his cap that Pyun doesn't: he's worked with Dolph.

As far as I can tell, we haven't played the Pyun Mainstay game since 2013, so I figured we'd bring it back and give some shine to one of the most mainstay-iest of mainstays, Norbert Weisser. This is his 18th film on the DTVC, only one of which, Android, wasn't a Pyun film. That's the most of any Pyun mainstay, and while we have someone like a Thom Mathews who's had 10 films on the site and all of them were Pyun flicks (remember, Mean Guns was reviewed twice, so that's why he has 10 instead of 11), 17 out of 18 is pretty prodigious. I wonder what he thought when Pyun was no longer directing. Maybe it didn't matter, since most of his scenes were shot in this chair right here. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently find this in the States on Tubi under the name More Mercy. It really is for Pyun and/or Wynorski completists, and late-night cable cinema from the late 90s/early 2000s connoisseurs. If you start it and you're like "what am I watching?", you're probably safe to turn it off. But if you start it and you're like "why do I watch stuff like this?", you're probably best to stop questioning it and settle in for the next 90s minutes or so.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373163

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