Super Cyclone (2012)

With this being Women's History Month, and knowing that one of my favorite films directed by a woman is the Asylum Mega Shark vs Gatoroid directed by Mary Lambert, I thought I'd go back to the Asylum well and found this potential gem written and directed by Liz Adams, and starring one of my favorite actors, Ming-Na Wen. Let's see how it did.

Super Cyclone is about an oil rig off the coast of LA that digs a little too deep and taps into an active volcano--or something like that. Engineer Nick Turturro realizes they're in trouble, and it only gets worse as a storm forms out of the super-heated volcano ocean water. When expert meteorologist Ming-Na and her partner are called in to help, the manager of the oil rig thinks it's best if Turturro goes with them back to the mainland, as a Super Cyclone is forming, and it's headed straight for LA. Now it's a race against time, as our crew needs to out-maneuver all manner of shaky cams and CGI obstacles to get to the local military base, where they can liaise with some stern upper military types, and come up with an off-the-wall solution that just may work.

And where does that leave us? With this pre-Sharknado era of The Asylum disaster film, who knows? We're looking for something special in this sea of CGI monsters and natural disasters complete with shaky cams and actors looking for a quick buck while waiting for their agents to come to them with something better, and despite the presence of Ming-Na, I don't know if this movie has it. Also, the guys working on the oil rig who were thrown into the ocean were essentially being boiled alive, and while "boiled alive" consisted of thrashing around in the water and yelling, the idea of it was still less fun and more grotesque--I mean, I turn the hot water up too much in the shower and the pain is pretty rough, I don't want to imagine anyone going through that. And therein lies the rub, for one of these movies to work, it needs to be fun, and I think this one, while it had its fun moments, overall didn't have as much fun in it for what I'd want.

When we look at Ming-Na's career at the time this film was made, this was just before Agents of SHIELD, and you can see that she doesn't do anymore Asylum flicks after that. As I mentioned above, I've always been a fan of hers, and think it's great that she's had this career resurgence through Agents of SHIELD, and now the Boba Fett series on Disney+. I think in this film we can at least see why she's been so successful on these other shows, because she brings a little extra to what is otherwise a pumped out paint-by-number jawn that The Asylum could sell to Sy-Fy so they could fill another time slot and rake in the ad revenue. At the very least, it seemed like she was having fun with it--but I imagine she's having much more fun with the work she's doing now.

When I started the DTVC, The Asylum was bigger with their Mockbusters--Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, etc. At a certain point, they transitioned to these disaster movies, I think in part because they had a deal with Sy-Fy to air the movies on there. As The Asylum is wont to do, they pumped out tons of these, while at the same time pumping out Mockbusters. Here I think is where Liz Adams comes in. She gives them two scripts--this and another film, Air Collision, and I imagine they're saying "if you can direct them for X amount of money, go for it," and then that's it, Liz Adams hasn't directed anything since, and really hasn't done much else in the movie industry since. She also wrote Shark Week in 2012, but that was directed by Fred Olen Ray's son Christopher, who is still pumping out DTV flicks, his most recent being Assault on VA-33. I don't know if that's telling, if there's something about doing this Asylum stuff that can be difficult to the point it turns someone off from movie making altogether, and you have to be the son of one of the greatest schlock auteurs of all time to want to keep working in that ecosystem. Maybe there is a sense of "did I get into this industry to write and direct a movie where I'm telling Ming-Na Wen and Nicholas Turturro to thrash around and act like their SUV was picked up by a super cyclone?"

And that gets us back to The Asylum. It's almost like they made our Hall of Fame last fall through sheer force of will. This is now 34 of their movies we've covered, and as much as I want to deride them or hate them, the volume of their output means it's too much of a statistical probability that I'll need to review more of their movies in the future, meaning they're a certainty for the 40 Club and beyond. I looked them up on IMDb, and it's showing they released 14 movies in 2021, plus 8 episodes of their series Black Summer. Again, it's a mix of Mockbusters and disaster movies, but nothing is really remarkable. By the same token, Fast and Furious: Death Race from 2020 is one of the most read reviews I've done since I've come back from hiatus, so it does highlight the fact that with that volume of output, they can still get hits from time to time--by the same token, my Sharknado 3 review is the least-viewed of my reviews since I've come back, which shows they can also overdo it to the point of fatigue.

Speaking of that volume, when I was seeing what pictures IMDb had of this movie, I saw some from the film's red carpet premier. The what now? This movie had a red carpet premier? Do all Asylum releases have a red carpet premiers? I looked, and Mega Python vs. Gatoroid also did. When I looked up Fast and Furious: Death Race, I didn't see one, nor did I for some others I looked at, but I was just going off the pictures on the IMDb page. I can't imagine they do 14 red carpet premiers a year, I feel like that would be worth another movie and a half for them. Anyway, when I looked at the pics of the premier for this film, it seemed like two actors from the film posted all of them, Andy Clemence, who was third billed in this and has 10 IMDb credits to his name; and Mitch Lerner, who has more credits on IMDb, but a lot of them are for shorts. It's like "hey, look at me with Ming-Na and Nicholas Turturro!" and they have the "yes, I'll do this picture with you" smile. Don't get me wrong, I would definitely get my picture with them too, it's just by posting it on the photos section of the IMDb page, we now know there was a red carpet premier for this movie, and we know Ming-Na and Nicholas Turturro had to get pictures with Mitch Lerner while they were at it.

And with that, let's wrap this up. It seems like this is on all the major streamers for free, including Tubi here in the States. I think if you're a Ming-Na fan like me, the better bet is to watch her on Agents of SHIELD or the Boba Fett show--or the short lived sitcom The Single Guy from the 90s if you can find it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2381317

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

 

 

 

 

Kate (2021)

With Netflix upping their prices (again), we were considering dumping them because we don't watch much on there, but with that in mind, I needed to clear out my queue first, and I saw this as one Netflix suggested. The trailer made it look pretty good, so despite the 105-minute runtime, I decided to take the plunge. In addition to us, among the 120+ other critic reviews on IMDb, our friends Todd Gaines at Bulletproof Action and Mitch Lovell at the Video Vacuum have covered this as well.

Kate has Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the eponymous hero, an assassin trained from a young age by Cheers alum Woody Harrelson to be a ruthless expert assassin. After a job where a child (Miku Martineau) witnesses her father being killed, Kate wants out, and tells Harrelson so. That leads us to the one last job scenario, after which we find out Kate has been poisoned and only has 24-48 hours to live, which leads us to the revenge/up against the clock scenario, and then in trying to exact her revenge, Kate finds the girl who witnessed Kate kill her father, so we now also have the assassin with the young kid scenario. Will Kate be able to manage all these scenarios before she dies?

Among all these scenarios, as you can imagine, at the end we also had the "put on your eye protection as the loose ends start flying together" scenario; but on top of all that, I was left with the "so what?" scenario. Yes, the visuals and action scenes were great, which I appreciated; but with all this well-worn territory, it was like "what is this movie giving me that I don't already have?" The answer to that might be "it's an action film, just go with it and enjoy the action," but if that's the case, this should've been twenty minutes shorter, and it at least should give me something new I can glom onto. Mary Elizabeth Winstead was great as the Huntress in Birds of Prey, but this character was much more one-dimensional, which we've seen so many times before that it obviated the need to cast someone as good as her in the part. The plot twists were so obvious you could see them coming a from the first ten minutes, which, again I'm not so upset about, except why then make the movie so long when we all know from the start where we're headed? This movie's not horrible by any stretch, and as I said above, I enjoyed certain aspects of it; I just think for as unremarkable as it ultimately was, it didn't need to be packaged as if it were something more than that.

This is our first Mary Elizabeth Winstead film we've covered on the site, and I think she did really well here, but it felt like the material didn't give her as much to work with, like had she had the chance, she could've done even more and made this thing really great. As I mentioned above, I liked her in Birds of Prey, but that film was about making multiple three-dimensional female characters, and being both written by and directed by a woman, I think we saw the result where we had even supporting characters like The Huntress having more depth than this film's main character. I'm not saying you need to have women writing or directing for the female character to have depth, see Columbiana; nor am I saying I need my action leads to have more depth, it's more like I was hoping for it when I saw Winstead was the star, and if the film is going to be packaged as more than just your run of the mill actioner, that's part of what I'm expecting. At the very least though, this and Birds of Prey hopefully will lead to more great stuff action from Winstead in the future.

Let's come back to the film's length, because I think that dovetails with an overall trend in films that I don't like. Do you know why I haven't seen The Batman yet? It's almost 3 hours long. Do you know how long Batman: Dead End is? 8 minutes, and it might be the best Batman ever. Avengers: End Game was also 3 hours, and I watched that at home over two sittings, and it made zero sense to me that a comic book movie needed to take that long, especially when you consider one of the best comic book movies ever, The Punisher with Dolph Lundren, is only 89 minutes (did you like the left-digit bias I did there?) When I look at a lot of the new action films on Netflix, 2-hour runtimes seem to be the norm, making this one at 105 on the shorter side. I get it if the film is Ran, Kurosawa making an adaptation of King Lear set in medieval Japan should be 3 hours--except it isn't, it's only 2 hours and 42 minutes. Action and comic book movies should be 90 minutes long. A more serious drama maybe in the 100-105 minute range; and then epics like Ran in the 160-180-minute range. That's it. (You may have found a hole in my own rules, considering the old 60s Batman film adaptation was 105 minutes, but it had 4 Bat-villains in it, so maybe that's another rule: you can go a little longer if you have more villains--and Bat shark repellent spray, that helps.)

As I mentioned above, this movie really looks nice, and I think going back to the runtime thing, you can have style over substance if it's in a shorter package. The thing is though, where does "looks nice" get us nowadays, when you have Target TV ads with these big colors that pop off the screen. Hell, I watch NHL games on ESPN+ on my standard HD TV, and a Stars-Preds game with those green and gold jerseys they have also looks nice--though man, I'm not a fan of those Devils third-color jerseys at all! The point I'm trying to make is, with digital coloring technology, everything looks nice, and it's almost like I'm just giving this movie credit for not going with the standard, drab, washed-out, color-less thing most "edgy" TV shows and movies are going with nowadays; but maybe the hope is, as more movies try what this one did, we'll start to see a shift back to more color in our movies, instead of less.

Finally, the film's title, Kate, not only makes it hard to find on IMDb, because I only get actors named Kate in my autofill, but also, I end up with the song "Wait" by White Lion in my head whenever I see it. Many people don't realize, "Wait" is based on an old Danish folktale about the unrequited love between two 14th century farmers, one of whom was named Olaf. You can hear it in the lyrics, "Olaf!... Olaf!... Wait... wait... I never had a chance to love you." Now if they ever made that into a movie, I could see that working at 105 minutes. (And before anyone starts searching for this online, I'm totally full of shit here... but I'd still like to see that movie made.)

And with that, let's wrap this up. Kate isn't horrible, and it has some great points, the problem is, at 105 minutes, it's sold to us as something bigger than that, and ultimately falls under the weight of it's own tropes, cliches, and one-dimensionality. As of this writing--and probably forever--you can get this on Netflix.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7737528

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

 

 

 

 

Almost Adults (2016)

For our March indie spotlight, I found this on Tubi and thought I'd give it a look. It felt like it could be a modern take on the 90s off-beat comedies I used to catch at the local indie theater. That was a fun time for movies, and there's a sense that through crowd sourcing and other independent means, we're getting a level of that back, which I hope is the case and could be really exciting.

Almost Adults is about two childhood friends in their last year of college in Ontario, Mackenzie (Elise Bauman) and Cassie (Natasha Negovanlis). Cassie has just broken up with her boyfriend, while Mackenzie has finally come out to her parents and is trying to find the right time to come out to Cassie too. Instead, Cassie finds out when a coworker shows her Mackenzie's Tumblr, which causes friction between them that only gets worse when Mackenzie starts dating her first girlfriend. As they're growing apart, Cassie is offered a dream job in New York City. Will these two friends reconcile before Cassie moves thousands of miles away?

 

This ultimately did what I wanted coming in, it gave me that old 90s indie feel. It had its flaws, but I liked the dynamic between the friends, and I also liked how writer Adrianna DiLonardo and director Sarah Rotella kept us from liking either of the two too much at the expense of the other. I also liked how they mitigated the issue of texting from a cinematic standpoint, as it wouldn't have made sense if the characters weren't texting one another, and I don't think it's easy to incorporate that in a way that's not obtrusive, but I think they pulled it off. There were some areas that felt like they could've been a bit trite, like Levi, the gay male best friend to the girls (Justin Gerhard) who seemed to really only exist as the conduit for the girls to bounce things off of; but the film doesn't let us get too comfortable in that trope, as Levi will excuse himself from whichever girl he's playing shoulder to cry on to go out and live his own life, which I appreciated. Overall, we had a great, dynamic story, about two friends at a crossroads that I found pretty relatable, but yet with elements that made it more than that and gave it more depth.

One of those elements was how it wasn't just Mackenzie's sexuality that created the tension between her and Cassie. Cassie was used to leaning on Mackenzie, and Mackenzie was used to being available for her. In the opening scene, we see Cassie in bed with Mackenzie, because Cassie is still not over splitting from her boyfriend (Mark Matechuk), and she needs someone to cuddle with. Later, when Cassie needs some retail therapy, she press-gangs Mackenzie into coming along, and then when her ex shows up with a new woman, she makes Mackenzie come into the fitting room with her while she's changing. It's not even that she takes for granted that she thinks Mackenzie's straight, it's almost like she thinks Mackenzie's asexual, and that's what she takes for granted. The first thing Cassie feels when she finds out she was the last to be told that Mackenzie is a lesbian is, "why was I last?" which translates to "how could I be last? What is this life Mackenzie has outside of me?"

But then this is where the movie takes a smart turn, and prevents us from being too much Team Mackenzie. As she starts to date Elliot (Winny Clarke), a member of the school soccer team, she becomes the one taking Cassie for granted. She drops Cassie mid-sentence to take a call from Elliot; or tells Cassie she's not hungry when Cassie suggests getting a pizza, only to tell Elliot she'd love to grab a bite to eat when Elliot calls two seconds later. I thought this worked really well, because Mackenzie is almost a quirky sitcom character in the way she's constructed, and without this turn to make her a little less sympathetic, she's essentially the character we're coming back to the Almost Adults TV show for each week. I love too how her lack of understanding of how Tumblr works is what gets her dumped by Elliot. That's when the film brings us back to her and makes her sympathetic again, just in time to wrap things up; but at the same time, Cassie has now become sympathetic too, she's no longer the person who takes her friend for granted.

I've brought up the Bechdel Test in previous posts, mostly because we rarely have movies here on the DTVC that actually pass it. What this movie does though is flips the Hollywood traditions that the Bechdel Test is meant to expose in a couple ways that I really liked. In one scene, we have Mackenzie talking to Levi about when she should tell Cassie she's a lesbian. Instead of needing two women talking about someone other than a guy, we have the standard Rom Com trope of two female characters talking about a male love interest subverted with a lesbian woman talking to her gay male friend about her platonic straight female friend. Later, near the end, we have Mackenzie and Cassie reconciling, two women talking about their friendship, and then as a going away memento, Mackenzie gives Cassie her Beach Time Ken doll, completely naked. I loved the idea of that, Hollywood films often have two women talking about a man in a scene, well here he is. We always talk about Marvel movies or other big productions showing us what's possible with filmmaking, but I think a film like this does that even more, as these norms of needing to have however much of the film centered around straight male characters is limiting the art much more than the technology needed to show Spider-Man flying through the city was, and a movie like this does a great job showing us what's possible.

Finally, I was trying to figure out what to do with this last paragraph. One, it's the second film to feature Tumblr, the other being another indie spotlight, Captain Slick Pants, which we covered back in 2013. I met my wife Jen on Tumblr, so it holds a special place in my heart, as you can imagine, despite the fact that I barely use it anymore. Another thing is the ex boyfriend's name was Matthew. Not Matt, but Matthew. I always joked that I only ever heard Matthew in two situations: when my mom was calling my name, and if there was a hurricane named Matthew. Now though, post pandemic with all the online ordering, when I create accounts I often let Google auto-fill everything, and it usually auto-fills Matthew, so when I go to places like Starbucks to pick up my order, that's the name that's called, and now Matthew has grown on me a bit, at least so it's as good as Matt. Finally, there was a joke about Cassie needing to sign every email at her internship with "Kindest Regards." I always end my emails with "All the best," but if the sentence before that was wishing someone "the best of luck going forward," I can't have two bests that close, so I will utilize "Kind regards"--I also find "Kind regards" works in a condolence situation. All of this is a roundabout way of saying, I get the whole issue around properly signing your emails, and maybe I think about it much too.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of my writing this, you can stream this for free on Tubi here in the States. I think that's a great deal. This is a fun, engaging film that's worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686862

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

 

 

 

 

Streets of Rage (1993)

I don't know how I made it 1100+ posts here on the site, and this is the first Mimi Lesseos movie we've covered. Okay, actually that's not entirely true, because she was in Final Impact, the PM Lamas flick we reviewed a couple years ago; but this is the first Lesseos starring film we've done. In addition to us, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance have covered this, along with Bulletproof Action and Daily Grindhouse, so you can go to their sites and see what they thought.

Streets of Rage has nothing to with the too sweet Sega Genesis 90s side-scroller, but rather follows Lesseos as Melody Sails, an intrepid fact-checker who wants to be a reporter, who also happens to be a former special forces soldier in the Army. In trying to dig up a story, she comes into contact with some local homeless kids, one of whom finds the local lady of the night (girl of the night is more apt considering how young she is) that gave him money from time to time dead in an alley. Sails thinks something's up, so she digs deeper, and finds that there's a local pimp exploiting these kids. That pimp won't like it when Lesseos gets a hold of him.

This is an interesting one, because it's very low-budget. Like the credits look like something from a 90s company's orientation video, and the film settles into its extreme low-budget-ness from there. Lesseos is fantastic as an action lead, the problem is, she's not really allowed to be an action lead due to the material (which was written by Lesseos). It's almost like she didn't know how to split the difference between action film and hard-hitting drama, so we were left with long periods of no action, which I think hurts us because that's why we're coming to this movie, to see her kick some ass. With an 85-minute runtime, we should have some kind of action every 10 minutes or so, and the message of these poor forgotten kids on the street should be embedded inside of that. Still, all those issues aside, Lesseos as a lead makes this a lot of fun, and from a 90s action film standpoint, I think this is worth a go. 

Again, this is our first time really covering a Lesseos film, but I think in watching this I see why. This should have been a full showcase of who Lesseos is as a martial artist and action lead, and it never fully did that for us. We didn't get a lot of fight scenes, and there were a couple where she was wearing a skirt and heels, which made them look a bit awkward as she couldn't pull off the moves as well as she'd have wanted. By the same token, we see the talent there, right from the first fight where she beats up two guys hassling one of the kids, which makes us want more. Done right--and I don't mean on a higher budget, but done with more consistent action scenes--this could have been the one that makes Lesseos on that level of some of the best 90s DTV stars. That leather jumpsuit she wears at the end should have been an iconic part of an iconic actioner, but ultimately the legacy of this film is what it could have been, as opposed to what it was, and I think unfortunately the same is true for Lesseos.

For review purposes I tend to watch the credits, just in case a name pops up (like Art Camacho, who's been in almost everything in early 90s DTV action), and one name I caught was Joseph Merhi, the "M" of PM Entertainment, in the "thanks" section. In addition to Final Impact, Lesseos was also in the PM flick The Last Riders, so that may be where the connection comes from, but I looked at her other films on IMDb and didn't see her thanking him in any others. One comp to Mimi Lesseos is Ronald Marchini, as they both went the route of making their own productions, but I wonder with Lesseos if it was more out of necessity. There are about 134 PM feature films listed on IMDb, and there aren't that many that have female leads; beyond that, there aren't many that don't have leads, male or female, who weren't established names. That makes me think maybe Merhi told Lesseos to establish her name first, and then he'd put her in some PM films. If that's the case, I think that's a major missed opportunity, as Lesseos teamed with Art Camacho and Spiro Razatos could have given us some all-time great stuff.

One interesting element about the script Lesseos wrote, is she developed her lead as someone who needed to discover her self-worth, despite the fact that she was a decorated veteran and special forces soldier. She's trying to make it as a reporter, and she's in a relationship with one of her coworkers, who is stringing her along. As the film goes on, she gets better suitors and can dump that coworker, but she's also gaining more self-confidence beyond what she can do as a fighter. I think she was trying to show a vulnerability we often don't see in action leads, and I liked that. The question is, how do you incorporate that into an action movie without diminishing the action quotient? I remember the film Colombiana did it well, but that was Zoe Saldana in a film written by Luc Besson and directed by Olivier Megaton. That's the kind of level this film was going for, and I appreciate that they were going for it, but as we saw here, it's tough to pull off.

 

Finally, I wanted to quickly touch on the old Sega game of the same name. It's crazy to think that game came out 30 years ago now. If any game could've spawned a great movie, it was that one. The thing is though, I would've said the same thing about Double Dragon, but the movie we got for that in the mid-90s wasn't all that great--though it had some great Dacascos. I imagine a Streets of Rage adaptation in the 90s would've killed everything good about that franchise too. I saw on Wikipedia that there's an adaptation in the works, but I feel like that's too late now. We needed a 90s straight ahead actioner with people like Jeff Wincott, Gary Daniels--and Mimi Lesseos. She would've been a great Blaze, right? Total missed opportunity there, no movie adaptation, no Mimi Lesseos in the no adaptation, and instead, while this Streets of Rage is a fun outing, we're just left with what ifs. One thing that is nice about the 2020s though: I can stream this movie for free on Tubi, and if I want to get nostalgic for the video game, I can watch someone playing it on YouTube.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As I just mentioned, this can be streamed for free on Tubi, and I think as an action fan it's worth it. This may not be the best, but Lesseos brings some solid martial arts in spots, which makes this an overall fun 90s actioner.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111302

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

 

 

 

 

Angel of Fury aka Triple Cross (1990)

With Cynthia Rothrock's birthday coming up on March 8th, I figured we'd review a movie in celebration, and this is one that's been on my to watch list for some time. How long you ask? When Ty and Brett at Comeuppance reviewed it in 2010, I said then that it was on my to watch list, so I guess almost 12 years. (I think as a Gen Xer, I'm supposed to make an obligatory "can you believe 2010 is 12 years ago!" comment, and now by saying I'm not going to make it, I've effectively made it... better to get on with the review...)

Angel of Fury is a recut and redubbed version of an Indonesian action film called Triple Cross, which has DTVC Hall of Famer and all-time great Cynthia Rothrock as Nancy Bolan, head of security for a technology company that is sending a super secret computer to Indonesia, and it's up to her to make sure it gets there safely. Bolt, a terrorist who's a cross between a poor man's Sly Stallone and a poor man's Miles O'Keeffe ("Feet O'Keeffe" then?), also wants it, and will stop at nothing to get it, including killing children. Then we have Bolan's ex, played by a poor man's Gary Daniels, who seems to be helping Rothrock, but considering the original title was "triple cross," can we trust him?

This is a rip-roarin' good time. Yes, it has its share of goofy moments, but they only add to the charm. There is no shortage of great fight scenes, and great Rothrock fight scenes at that. In one scene where Rothrock is taking a woman and her daughter to the mall, we get this meandering, almost real-time wandering the store thing where we wonder why we're having to sit through this, only to have the baddies show up, toss a sack on Rothrock, and throw her down the escalator straight into a fight and foot chase sequence, which culminates in the daughter being kidnapped and tossed in an SUV, and Rothrock, giving chase on a dirt bike, eventually jumping off the bike and supposedly kicking the driver through the windshield ("windscreen" for my UK readers). I say supposedly ("supposably" for my American readers), because all we see is her jump kicking, and then a man with a bloody face, then the SUV flipping over. However it comes, we'll take it, and this film is ready to give it.

We're now at 38 films for Rothrock, two shy of the 40 Club. It's only a matter of time, but when I see that the last Rothrock film I did was Santa's Summer House 8 months ago, I realize it's more on me to make sure that happens by reviewing more of her movies more often. This Asian productions pre-China O'Brien part of her career we haven't delved into as much, in part because movies like this were tougher to come by, but through the advent of YouTube, we're seeing more of them. It would be nice though if companies like Vinegar Syndrome got a hold of these gems. Considering the Tiger Claws and Martial Law films have been released by them, hopefully her Asian productions won't be far behind. Rothrock is a national treasure, and while we often use that term in a tongue and cheek way, here I'm serious. She's one of the best to ever do it, and this film is another one that shows us why.

In order to mitigate the shirtless male bondage plus torture trope that was popular for male action stars of this period, this film goes for the wet-T-shirt female bondage approach instead, that way Rothrock didn't need to be shirtless. It's funny how instead of just not doing it at all, they had to do it by tweaking it. It's a great scene though, as the Indonesian Mr. T makes an appearance, which adds to the scene's overall ludicrosity. I also loved how they got her there: the classic blow dart tranquilizer. The thing I don't understand is, if this is so effective--and it seems to have 100% success rate--, why don't the baddies use it more often? Like in the final battle scene, where is this blow dart guy? He should be tranqing folks left and right. Was he using his PTO? I get it, you want your employees to take time off when they need it, but during a big hostage trade-off where you're swapping Rothrock for the computer you've been after all movie, maybe this isn't a good day for him to be out. I also get that, maybe the blow dart guy put in for it well in advance, and then this swap thing came up suddenly, how can you tell him that needs to come into work now? Well, it couldn't have worked out any better for Rothrock, because without the blow dart guy, the baddies didn't stand a chance.

This is not the first time we've seen Rothrock in Indonesia, the Lady Dragon films and Rage and Honor II were also shot in Indonesia. Now with Iko Uwais as one of the biggest current martial arts stars, Indonesian action is an area I've barely scratched the surface on, but one I need to get into more. I know Jacob Gustafson in his Awful Awesome Action Vol. 1 mentioned Indonesian action films, and he said they can be a bit brutal, which may explain why I haven't seen as many. This movie didn't really have a lot of that in it, it was more just a fun actioner, which I'm always a fan of. In the trivia on the IMDb page, we find out that Rothrock got food poisoning after she swallowed water during the wet T-shirt bondage torture scene, which not only sounds like a uniquely Indonesian work hazard, but shows again how trying to conform to these action movie conventions can do more harm than good. Hopefully no one was hurt during the car into helicopter explosion--which was too sweet and so necessary.

Finally, in our latest installment of "why movies from this era are better than their modern counterparts," we have this guy. Here he's fantastic, with his blond hair, suit, and sunglasses. Today, he'd probably be bearded, tatted, with hair shaved on the sides and long on top, maybe back in a man bun or ponytail, and oozing with modern American jack ass-ery. Maybe he has a T-shirt with a busy pattern on it, TJ Maxx-style designer jeans, and says things like "bro" and "man" a lot. He'd be presented to us as some who's as cool as the rest of the movie, when the rest of the movie isn't that cool either, we'd just be waiting for the Danny Trejo or Vinnie Jones appearance and wonder why we even watched it, as that "Wildfire in the Streets" song is playing over the credits. Anyway here's to you that guy above, you're one of the good ones.

And with that, let's wrap this up. I had to go the YouTube route for this one. You might be able to find a used VHS as well, and I think this is the rare movie where I'd say that's worth it. Great Rothrock action, and she's the kind of star whose films are worth collecting.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106279

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!