Cartels aka Killing Salazar (2016)

This is one I watched a while back on I think Epix, and then it was taken down or we lost the Epix free trial or something like that, so I waited for it to become available, and when it didn't, I got images from the trailer so I could review it, only for it to be added to Tubi. It was also available as Killing Salazar with a different cover on Xfinity, so after watching it on Epix, I went to watch Killing Salazar, only to discover they were the same movie. In addition to us, our friend Mitch from the Video Vacuum has covered this. 

Cartels has Luke Goss as a special forces soldier who's been called in by the US Marshals to join their team, who are then called in by the DEA to do a job for them? The "job" is transporting crime boss Florin Piersic, who everyone thinks is dead after DEA agent Steven Seagal kills him. These transport things never go as planned, and another DEA agent, Howard Dell, tells the marshals (who are maybe more military than marshals?) they need to "sit" Piersic in a fancy hotel in Romania before can be transported back to the States, where he's going to rat out other criminals. Once things go bad, will Goss be able to make it out alive?

This is roughly what the story is, and to be honest, does it matter that much? This thing has the feel of a project that was made because Seagal's people came to line producer Ben Sacks and asked if he could get him another movie because Seagal needed the money. (I also have this sense because Sacks was interviewed on "I Must Break This Podcast" with Sean Malloy, and he talked about this kind of thing with Seagal.) Looking at it in that vein, this is one of three films like this made at the same time and released in 2016, the others being Contract to Kill and End of a Gun (the latter of which I haven't seen yet), and while this isn't the greatest, as I watched it I wondered if it had someone other than Seagal if it would've been a lot better. I tried my best to see how many scenes Seagal did with the other stars, and it's possible it was none, and that any time we see Seagal with another star that he was edited in using Lucas-style alchemy--one that stands out in particular, when Seagal and Goss are in the interrogation room, and they bring in someone from Goss's unit who attacks Goss, and then Seagal gets the guy in some wrist locks to stop him. After that, Seagal and Goss sit back at the table, and it's possible it's the one scene they did together, but it's also possible Goss was added in after. There's also a fight Seagal has with UFC champ George St-Pierre, where I think neither actually fought the other, that they were shot at separate times and fought doubles. The Seagal double thing was so bad, that they gave his double a credit among the cast (which is not where he's listed on the IMDb credits). On that score, maybe the take isn't that this film is pretty unremarkable among the rest of Seagal's DTV filmography, but rather that it's amazing how remarkable this is at all considering how Waxman, Sacks, et al were able to Frankenstein this together with all the Seagal constraints involved.

We're now at 37 films for Seagal on the site, with I think three left: Gutshot Straight, which I've watched and just need to review; End of a Gun, which I'm waiting to be available on one of the streaming services, but may have to rent to see; and Clementine, which I haven't been able to find in English. Those together should get us to 40 for him, plus he has a couple new projects in development. According to the IMDb trivia, this was the last of his Waxman films, but on his filmography, they list it in between Contract to Kill and End of a Gun. Either way, after he does these three with Waxman that come out in 2016, his output slows down, only doing China Salesman in 2017, Attrition in 2018, and then seems like he gets back to his old self with General Commander and Beyond the Law in 2019, before the pandemic hits in 2020. This one feels like the worst of the bad Seagal, where it's obvious he's not in a lot of scenes with his costars, to the point that he may not even be doing the fights. Most of it is Seagal behind a desk in a leather jacket with his Chia Pet goatee saying things to Goss while he interrogates him like "I wasn't born on the fucking turnip truck, man!" and "I wasn't born at night, it was a bright, beautiful, fucking day," whatever that means. By this film, it's all almost become a parody of itself, but the results are there, as this is on Tubi with him front and center on the cover, set up perfectly for anyone browsing thinking this might be a fun Saturday night watch, and now Lionsgate gets another stream and a cut of the Tubi ad revenue.

 

It would be interesting to know if Luke Goss did a single scene with Seagal, or if that one time they're in the shot together he was CGI'd in Lucas-style. That's one advantage to having the younger guy doing the heavy lifting being a bald guy, he's easier to double in post if you need. Also, one of the advantages to being the heavy lifting guy in a Seagal film is you never know when Keoni Waxman's going to stop making Seagal films and will need someone to act in a new project, like he did when he tapped Goss to be in The Hard Way with Michael Jai White. This film had a lot of Bro Energy, with guys grimacing, pointing weapons, yelling military jargon at each other, etc., and that's where Goss's American accent makes him the Super Bro, like the rest of the cast were pulled from the decent clubs in Vegas on a weekend, but Goss was from a slightly more upscale one. He smokes cigarettes better than everyone else, he grimaces better, he holds guns better. The problem was, I don't think this needed more Bro Energy, it needed Brit Goss with his natural accent, maybe tossing out some British slang, or calling an eggplant an aubergine. One thing I hope is, with the current rise of the British actioner, people will want Goss to be an American less, because the films where he gets to be a Brit tend have a bit more flavor to them, and a movie like this that had a lot going against it due to the constraints that come when Seagal's involved needed all the help it could get.

This is now 11 films for Keoni Waxman on the site, of which 9 are Seagal films. The two of them did 10 total, the one I'm missing being End of a Gun, so the question will be after that one how many more we do. While he has a few that fit what we go for on the site, he has others like The Anna Nicole Smith Story that we probably won't cover. That number sounds low, but for directors on the DTVC, other than Pyun who has over 40, no one else has more than 15, so Waxman is right in there with some of the greats; on the other hand, as we do more from those guys, he may get left behind if he's moving on to projects that don't fit what we do here on the DTVC. I think that's okay though, his work as the Seagal Whisperer will go down in DTVC history as one of the great feats, and this film could potentially be his best work if this was made the way I think it was made. I literally could count on one hand the scenes Seagal had where he was in the same shot as his costars--and even those were suspect. The use of doubles, overdubs, creative angles, possibly even CGI to make it look like Seagal was interrogating Goss, or even better, fighting George St-Pierre if they weren't really fighting, is like Godfrey Ho level stuff; plus his action scenes were really well done, especially in spite of his constraints. I'd say he's cemented his legacy with us, but I'm still curious to see what he has in store next for us, or to explore some of his earlier work.

Finally, as someone who was a huge fan of the UFC in the mid-to-late 2000s, George St-Pierre was one of my favorites, so it was fun to see him here. Right before this he did Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which I haven't seen yet, and then played that role again in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV series, which I also haven't seen yet. He has a couple things in post-production right now, so it'll be cool to see how his career progresses. This is his fourth film on the site, the first two being Hector Echavarria TapOut films, and the third Kickboxer: Vengeance, so it looks like he's getting better parts. I think a buddy picture with Adkins directed by Jesse V. Johnson would be the best, maybe something where Adkins is sent to Canada to take down a criminal, and he has to team up with St-Pierre who's already working on taking him down. And what would be great is it could be shot in Canada, and actually take place in Canada, instead of Canada pretending to be America. How nice would that be?

Since I'm done talking about the current movie and pitching a new one, it's probably time to wrap this up. You can catch this on Tubi here in the States. Personally I think this is only for Seagal completists, or St-Pierre or Goss fans. Outside of that, it's better to skip it, but I appreciate the work done here to get this film over the finish line in as good a shape as it was.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4949290

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

Death Match (1994)

Back in April I had the guys from Comeuppance on the podcast to discuss Matthias Hues, and I figured this was one I needed to make happen in order to give my list integrity. As luck would have it, the film's star (not listed on the tin) Ian Jacklin posted a nice copy on his YouTube page. In addition to us and Comeuppance, this has been covered by our friends at Bulletproof, Cool Target, Fist of the B-list, Action Elite, and DTV Digest's Rich Hawes's old site Have a Go Heroes.

Death Match has Ian Jacklin and his buddy as two guys working the docks to make some extra cash. When they split up and Jacklin moves north to take an office job, his buddy joins an underground fighting ring run by Martin Kove and Matthias Hues. When said buddy won't kill his opponent, they put him on ice, and Jacklin needs to abandon his office job dreams and come back to LA to find out what happened to him. It won't be easy, as Kove and Hues are big time players in the underground crime world, so he enlists the help of a local reporter investigating the duo, Renee Allman. Together, can the two find out what happened to his friend?

This is pretty solid DTV 90s action fare, and I think that's what you're coming to this for, so that's a good thing. While this is meant to be an Ian Jacklin vehicle, Hues's larger-than-life presence and larger-than-life hair steal the show. In one scene that's particularly 90s, he goes to beat up Jacklin's friend for not killing his opponent, but the problem is he can't get his bolo tie undone, so he has to rip it off. On top of that, we have two legends in Art Camacho and Benny "The Jet" Urquidez as fight choreographers, and that kind of quality shows in all fight scenes. And then if all that wasn't enough, there are a bunch of cameos from guys like Richard Lynch, Jorge Rivero, Urquidez, and even someone like a Marcus Aurelius. This is the fun 90s DTV action you came for.

While we usually start with the film's DTVC Hall of Famers--and in this we have two, Camacho and Kove--we'll start with Hues instead, because he's why I came to this, and I really like him here. He was one of those guys who just made a 90s movie better, and this typifies that. How is Jacklin supposed to beat this guy, right? He's huge, a superior athlete, and the hair is formidable enough to send someone running. With Kove, he's a standard evil crime boss baddie, but as the film goes on, there's a sense of "why is Hues working for him? He should be working for Hues!", and the movie even gets that and has that conversation. This is now 17 films on the DTVC, and with many more to review, I think 30 Club and beyond is in his future, we just need to get the films in the can. And then before that, maybe this fall he'll have a Hall of Fame induction?...

 

It would be wrong to go much further in this post and not mention Ian Jacklin, the main protagonist and the one who was supposed to be the star. He's good here for sure, and I think as a good guy it would've been interesting to see him acting with guys like Gary Daniels and Frank Zagarino in buddy pictures, because those would've been some nice fight scenes. Most of the work he did was as a baddie, and often not the main baddie, but ones who showed up here or there to bother the hero. I think beyond this he has one other as the main hero, Expert Weapon, which he also has uploaded on his YouTube page. As an aside, that YouTube page is interesting: one of his uploads is him telling a school board at one of their public meetings that masks don't work, which I didn't watch, but I guess that makes him the male equivalent of a Karen--is that a "Chad'? Perhaps a "Darren"? I know what you're thinking, "Matt, why do we have to gender everything?" You're right, we'll just say he's now a Karen, and leave it at that. At least he was good in this movie, and despite his newfound Karen-ness we did give him his tag, which, with the retroactive tagging gives him 13 movies on the site. Not a bad number.

Our two DTVC Hall of Famers are Martin Kove and Art Camacho. For Kove this is only 17, and among Hall of Famers he has one of the lower tag counts, which was never intentional, but I think because a lot of his stuff is in this 90s DTV action category, and where there's so much to cover, it's easy for a lot of them to get lost in the shuffle. Just looking at Death Match in that mix, would it be top 30 for a 1990 to 1994 list? Top 50? Definitely top 50, but that just reaffirms the point, that the early 90s were chock full of DTV action-y goodness, that we're only getting to a gem like this one 1100+ posts in. I think as we delve into more at the second and third tiers, we'll start getting more Kove reviewed--plus I'm hoping his role in the new Cobra Kai series will get more movies like this bigger releases so we don't have to scrounge around former DTV martial artists-turned Karen's YouTube pages to find them. Anyway, for Art Camacho, this 48 movies on the site. A stalwart of 90s DTV action, what we know of as the genre's golden age wouldn't have been as golden without him, and it'll be great when we eventually get him in as the third person in the 50 Club, joining Dolph and Gary Daniels. If you aren't already doing it, you should follow his Instagram account. He posts great behind the scenes pics and reels of all the things he's working on.

Finally, this film employs a DTV action cliche that's never really made a lot of sense to me: killing off the opponent in an underground fight. Maybe it makes sense as a way to gin up excitement if you have some fighters who are at the end that can't compete with the newer talent, two of them fight to the death, and if you lose one, easy come easy go, right? It's like a macabre version of the glue factory for old horses. But making your best fighters fight to the death seems absurd. It's be like in baseball if the Mets and Phillies played, and the winner had to kill the loser, look at all the revenue you're losing by not having the loser around to keep playing; or if I owned a shop that sold Coke (TM) and Pepsi (TM), and after a customer chose to buy a Coke, I took all the Pepsi cans out back and emptied them in the sewer drain. Yes, I understand it adds a level of drama in the movie if the fight is to the death, and also if these gangsters were really good at business they'd be plying their crime trade legally on Wall Street, but still, what good did it serve Kove and Hues to be killing off their moneymakers? 

And considering I'm critiquing the business acumen of two baddies in a 90s DTV actioner that can currently only be found on the now-Karen star's YouTube page mixed in among his anti-masker uploads, it's probably time to wrap this up. Beyond going to Jacklin's YouTube account, there is a UK DVD version, or you can find it on VHS for a heavy price. I think the Jacklin's YouTube upload is the way to go, but hopefully Kove's recent popularity will get this thing a Blu-ray release, as it deserves it. Do it for the kids.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109576

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

Nemesis (2021)

This is one I've been meaning to get to for some time, especially since it's been available on Tubi here in the States. I remember when Shogun Films was first in the process of making it, they were posting updates on their Instagram page, building a lot of anticipation, so I'm glad now I'm finally able to make it happen. In addition to us, our friends Todd Gaines at Bulletproof Action, and the guys at DTV Digest have also covered this. 

Nemesis has Billy Murray as John Morgan, a London crime kingpin who returns to the city after spending some time abroad. He and his wife Sadie (Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott) are attending a charity dinner, then hoping to meet their daughter's (Ambra Moore) girlfriend (Lucy Aarden). As you can imagine though, a crime kingpin with the career and success that Morgan has had would create many enemies, including disgraced police detective Nick Moran, Morgan's own brother (Frank Harper), and a rival kingpin who Murray kicks his earnings up to, Bruce Payne. All of these chickens come home to roost during Morgan's family dinner, and the question is, will he be able to make it out alive?

This felt like Shogun Films announcing their arrival, the kind of first film from a production company that lets you know they're only getting started. The biggest element for me was the characters, both how they were written and the actors playing them. Starting with Billy Murray is always a solid bet, and then they surrounded him with other UK stalwarts like Nick Moran, Bruce Payne, Frank Harper, and even Julian Glover; but also Lucy Aarden and Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, who both don't have the experience those other names have, really held their own. I think from a story standpoint, a home invasion dynamic is always difficult to pull off, because we can only keep the players in that situation for so long before we feel like we're spinning our wheels; but I liked the attempt to mitigate that by devoting the first 45 minutes of the film to building the backstory, which created more of a slow burn vibe. Also this movie moves in some different directions from your standard home invasion or gangster film. Sothcott's Sadie is grittier and has more edge than the usual mobster wife, which made her a great wild card in this scenario; and I liked how I wanted to root for Billy Murray because he's so great, but here are Lucy Aarden and Nick Moran's characters to keep me from liking him. This really worked for me, and is worth checking out, at least on Tubi.

Nick Moran was one of my favorite parts of this. Here on our site, we usually only get to see him in the Billy Murray or Bruce Payne gangster role, which I also enjoy, but his job here as disgraced detective Frank Conway was fantastic. The movie is more centered on John Morgan and the chickens he has coming home to roost--one of which is supposed to be Moran--but Moran's performance elevates it beyond that. He was also great as the guy below Craig Fairbrass in Avengement, but I think that's the role we expect Moran to do and which he's always great at. What makes a movie like this work is when someone like a Moran plays someone we're not as used to him playing and he hits it out of the park.

With mafia movies and TV shows, there's a tradition of the gangster's wife being almost as iconic as the gangster himself. The thing that I liked about Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott's Sadie, is unlike Carmela Soprano, Karen Hill, or Kay Adams, Sadie felt like she had a grittiness to her that came from coming up in the same world Murray's John Morgan does. Out of those three, maybe Karen Hill would be the kind of wild card Sadie was during the home invasion, but even she wouldn't have had the edge Sadie did. Even though this film takes place in London and involves English gangsters, cinematically it can still be hard to get out from under the shadow of The Sopranos, Goodfellas, and The Godfather, but I thought the character of Sadie was one area where the film did that successfully, and Sothcott's performance added an element that we needed to keep us in suspense in the home invasion construct.

None of this works without Billy Murray in the lead. I remember when Shogun Films was giving us teasers on Instagram, there was one of Murray getting fitted for a suit, and there was a sense then that this could be good, but Murray is something else here. I didn't picture him gleefully setting a car on fire with someone who crossed him strapped inside when we were seeing those behind the scenes Instagram posts. Even his gangster walk as he's heading down the hallway to meet with Bruce Payne was one of those added touches I didn't know I needed. As the center around which everything else orbited, he had to be compelling, and he didn't leave anything to chance in his performance. From there we have Moran, Sothcott, Frank Harper, and Lucy Aarden all acting opposite him, and he becomes like a sun, where anything in his orbit that gets too close gets burned; but also in Sothcott and his daughter's case, (played by Ambra Moore, granddaughter to my favorite Bond, Roger Moore), he can give life too, and Murray plays that duality so well.

Finally, when I first started the DTVC back in 2007, one of the first sites that linked us was Bruce's Angels, a site that two women ran who were huge fans of Bruce Payne. I remember that was back in the MySpace days, and I had this cheap computer that had almost no RAM. They posted this big flashing Bruce Payne gif on my MySpace wall, and it froze my computer so I had to delete it. I felt so guilty, because it was such a nice gesture on their part. That was just before Kenner at Movies in the Attic also pinged me on MySpace to tell me how much he dug the site, but at that time I had no idea that my site would bring me into contact with so many people, and the woman at Bruce's Angels were just the start of that. Even though their site is no longer live, I've kept them near the top of my "Other Great Sites" section in honor of their early support, which played a big role in building the initial momentum that got us here, and for which I'll always be grateful.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Here in the States you can screen this on Tubi, which, at 90 minutes is a great deal. Jonathan Sothcott and Shogun Films are off to a great start with this one, and I can't wait to see what they do next with Renegades. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11618350

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

Picasso Trigger (1988)

In our continuing goal of getting all of the Sidaris LETHAL Ladies films on the site, we come to this film here, the fourth one we've covered so far. With 12 total in the series, I guess we can say we're a third of the way there, so we're not quite like Tommy and Gina living on a prayer. In addition to us, our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has covered this--and he was on our podcast episode about Dallas Connection where we discussed all the Sidaris films--and Bulletproof Action--though not Todd Gaines, who's renown for being big on all of these movies.

Picasso Trigger has John Aprea as a crime boss of the same code name who is killed by fellow crime boss Rodrigo Obregon. From there, Obregon tries to kill off all the agents that put his brother in jail, which means the Agency needs to call their best agents into action to take him and his cronies down. Leading the crew is a new Abilene, Travis (Steve Bond), who still can't shoot straight, but is doing well with the ladies, moving between Dona Speir, and the mysterious agent Pantera (Roberta Vasquez), whom he dated in college. Will Abilene and his crew be able to take all these baddies down?

This, like the others in the LETHAL Ladies series, is a lot of fun. I think this takes what was established in Hard Ticket to Hawaii and turns it up even more. We have all the guns, explosions, remote control toys, dirt bikes, jet skies, and Ferraris you'd want, plus all the boobs and buttocks. There are also a lot of names in this, from the classics we all know and love like Speir, Obregon, Hope Marie Carlton, Cynthia Brimhall and Harold Diamond, but we also get DTVC favorite Keith Cooke, Bruce Penhall in his first appearance in the series, and Dennis Alexio, one short year before he was killed in Kickboxer so Van Damme could go to Thailand and have a great drunk dancing scene. On the other hand, this might not be as much of a classic as some of the others--like Hard Ticket to Hawaii--so if you're introducing people to the series, or you're getting into them yourself, you might want to try one of those others first, and come to this one after. Still worth your viewing though.

By the time we get to this third film, you could sense that the Abilene who can't shoot straight may have lost its luster a bit. I think more than anything that's because Steve Bond, while good, isn't as remarkable as the original Darby Hinton, or Ronn Moss after, who was also a step down from Hinton. I realized when I wrote the Hard Ticket to Hawaii review that I'd jumped the gun on when Sidaris moved from lessening the role of the Abilene who can't shoot straight character and making Dona Speir the lead, as it wasn't this movie, but the next one, Savage Beach. I think I've mentioned this before, but that run by Speir in her seven Sidaris films has to put her up there as one of the greatest female action leads. When you look at some of the names people generally throw out there like Milla Jovovich and Angelina Jolie, she's right up there with the number of credits, and she was doing it before them. For me I might have her top five, after Pam Grier, Cynthia Rothrock, Michelle Yeoh, and Zoe Saldana. After Speir I'd have names like Michelle Rodriguez, Jovovich, Jolie, etc. Yes, these movies are a lot of fun, and have a lot of T n' A, but that shouldn't diminish from what Speir was doing here and her role as an all-time action lead.

Obregon's hatchet men were played by Keith Cooke and Bruce Penhall. For Cooke, this was his first role before he jumps into Rothrock's China O'Brien series as Dakota. He also used his birth surname here, Hirabayashi--Cooke is his mother's maiden name. He doesn't do any martial arts in this, which is kind of too bad, considering Harold Diamond is in this, I'd love to have seen them get after it. Penhall of course would come to be known for these films, but in this first of the 8 he did, he plays a baddie. It's like the Fast and Furious movies where the baddies join the good guys in later films, only instead of the mental gymnastics required to believe that after Jason Statham's character was trying to murder Vin Diesel that that would suddenly be water under the bridge; here Sidaris just has Penhall play different characters, first Bruce Christian in the Speir films, and then Chris Cannon when the series shifts to being led by Julie Strain.

This is our second Harold Diamond film on the site, the first being when we did Hard Ticket to Hawaii. He's a fascinating specimen of the late 80s/early 90s. The hair, the voice, the shirts and jumpsuits that absolutely must be worn open, it all works so much on that level; but at the same time, he's a great martial artist, which makes him a lot of fun to watch. Especially good here was his fight scene with Dennis Alexio, which Diamond choreographed. Looking at his IMDb bio, he hasn't done much. He has 10 credits, but as far as what we'd do here, he has these two Sidaris movies, two Amir Shervan films, a Zagarino actioner, and then in 2017 he was in an Asylum joint, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, where he plays Merlin. Interestingly enough, that was going to be the film I was going to do for their DTVC Hall of Fame induction post, not knowing Diamond was in it, but I opted for Fast and Fierce: Death Race instead after I fell behind and didn't end up doing their post until the May after. Now knowing it has Diamond makes it more intriguing.

Finally, this movie has something in common with another film released the same year, The Secret of King Mahi's Island, they both have explosives attached to a boomerang used as a weapon. Unlike the Daniels flick that uses it to blow up a helicopter, in this it's used to blow up Penhall. Was this a case of polygenesis, or was there an explosive boomerang that predated these movies as the inspiration? I thought maybe a Bond movie I've never seen may have done it, but I couldn't find anything. Also there was the DC baddie Captain Boomerang, who employed explosive boomerangs. Could Sidaris and one of the writers of The Secret of King Mahi's Island have been into comics and liked the idea of that? One element of this movie that I'm pretty sure was sui generis, was the use of Chekhov's Pacemaker. In the opening of the film we find out that baddie John Aprea has a pacemaker, and as we know, you can't mention that a character has a pacemaker in the opening unless you plan to use it at the end, which Sidaris does. How he does is another stroke of brilliance: a homing missile launched from a modified crutch.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now, this is available to stream free here in the US on Tubi. Take advantage of it while you can, because last year these were all taken down. At that time, when they were all available, I watched all 12 in preparation of my podcast episode with Mitch, so when Letterboxd told me who my most watched director and actor of the year were, I got Sidaris and Obregon. So far this year Sidaris is behind Scorsese for me, 4 to 2; but Obregon is way behind guys like Adkins, Dolph, Zagarino, and Hues, especially after I did a bunch of their movies in anticipation of podcast episodes on them. It looks like I need to binge another complete series to get them both back up there.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095867

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

Raven Hawk (1996)

This is one I've been meaning to get for years. For the longest time, there was only a foreign language dub version on YouTube. Sometime last year there was an English-language version, but before I had a chance to review it, it was taken down. Then recently Kevin Hazell reached out on the Facebook page and mentioned a YouTube account, The Movie Man, that had a bunch of stuff uploaded. When I started paging through, I noticed some Pyun flicks, and thought this might be it, and sure enough, there it was. In addition to us, Bulletproof Action and RobotGEEK's Cult cinema have covered this, plus Ty from Comeuppance posted a sweet VHS of this on his Instagram page.

Raven Hawk has Rachel McLish as a woman who, as a girl, is framed for her parents' murders by some corrupt developers who want to install a nuclear waste disposal site on Native American land. After spending twelve years in a mental institution, while being transported to a prison, her van flips and she survives. Now free, she's out for revenge, ready to kill those responsible. At the same time, John Enos III is a reservation police officer investigating her murders. He knows there's more going on here. But the baddies aren't going down without a fight either. They've called in a crew of Pyun mainstays to take her down. Will she be victorious?

This is pretty close to pure Pyun, in that we have a strong female protagonist, who is also a woman of color, ready to take down a bunch of bad guys. I read in the IMDb trivia that he wanted to play up McLish's character's mystical and emotional aspects more, while the producers wanted something more like a female Rambo, so they took it away and made it more of what we got. I liked it as a straight-ahead revenge actioner, but I also see what Pyun was thinking too--why make it in the tradition of the white male protagonist, when you have a female Native American hero you can do more with it. At the very least it would've been interesting to see that, but this worked for me, and I think the amount that Pyun was able to influence it made it work. McLish is great as the hero, and I liked too that there were no damsel in distress moments, no male hero like John Enos III's character coming to save her. It's shame that out of all of Pyun's movies, this is one of the tougher ones to find, because I think it's one of his better ones.

This is the 44th film for Pyun here at the DTVC, but as a director it's number 42--we did Mean Guns twice, which is how he has 45 tags, plus Nemesis 5, which he produced, and then Dollman vs. Demonic Toys where archive footage that he directed in Dollman was used. 42 puts him a good 27 ahead of the director with the second-most director tags here, Fred Olen Ray, who has 15. Looking at what we have left for him, there's Left for Dead--which I discovered is free on Vudu right now, so I need to do that soon!--, Cool Air, and then two I'm having trouble getting, The Interrogation of Cheryl Cooper and Interstellar Civil War: Shadows of the Empire, so that plus his producer credit on the Ray-directed Final Examination would get Pyun close to the 50 Club. If that's the case, that he's one away, maybe we count that second Mean Guns review just to get him in there. One of the best DTV directors ever, and this movie is a great one of his.

 

We'll cut to the chase and get right to our favorite game: who are the Pyun mainstays in this? In this case, all three were tapped by Pyun to be the team of mercenaries called in by the baddies to take McLish down. We start with DTVC favorite Vincent Klyn. Back off Warchild, seriously. He plays a Maori warrior, complete with accent. He's at 19 films here at the DTVC, which is huge for a guy who plays a lot of supporting roles, and puts him now one ahead of fellow Pyun mainstay Norbert Weisser, who was tied with him for 18. Next we have Thom Matthews. That's 12 for him, and while this is a pretty pedestrian performance as Matthews goes, it was good that Pyun got him in this. Same with Nicholas Guest, who is now at 10 movies on the site. Other than Klyn, who would be tagged because he's Warchild--seriously--the others only have tags and the volume of posts on the site because of Pyun. I thought the late Ed Lauter, who is in this as a sheriff, had done more Pyun too, but this is the only film they did together. Same with Mitchell Ryan, who plays Enos's boss.

Rachel McLish did not make a lot of movies, and according to the IMDb trivia, she credits that with her changing her mind about a nude scene Pyun wanted her to do when she's going through a ritual of spiritual transcendence. Eventually she agreed to be topless for it. Honestly, in watching the scene, I don't know that she needed to be nude for it, no matter what the reason. She was a great action lead, and if that was the reason why directors didn't want to work with her, or if it turned her off from the business, that's too bad. I was trying to think how many of Pyun's female protagonists had nude scenes, and one that comes to mind is Victoria Maurette in Bulletface, which was more a series of disjointed scenes in a prison rape sequence. Maybe that's what Pyun wanted to do here as well, not fully show McLish's nude body, but cut and mix things so the focus wasn't on her nudity, but the spirituality. By the same token, if McLish felt uncomfortable with it she felt uncomfortable with it, and could she really trust that what Pyun wanted to do was what would've been the end product, especially since the film was taken from him by the producers?

 

Finally, we have a Star Trek: The Next Generation sighting in John de Lancie--who, unlike Lauter and Ryan, had worked with Pyun before this, in Arcade. In addition to Arcade, he was also in an indie flick we reviewed, Cloned, making this 3 tags for him. For TNG alums, he's one behind Michael Dorn, who has 4 tags. In this he plays a senator who's pulling all the strings, kind of Q-ish actually. Two things I didn't know about him: he's from Philadelphia, and he was born in the late 40s. About the latter, I liked that for the new Picard series they didn't do like they did with Mark Hamill in The Mandalorian and use a computer image of his face to make him look younger. De Lancie played one of my favorite sci-fi characters of all time, and I think a big part of why I loved him so much was de Lancie's performance, so any time I can spotlight him on the site I want to.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now, this can be streamed on YouTube, or bought used on VHS. I think there may also be DVDs outside the USA region. The thing is, this was released here in the States on HBO first, so if they have it, why not put it on HBOMax? They have Collision Course, this wouldn't be too far of a stretch beyond that. A guy can dream, right?

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117446

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