Enemy Gold is a reset of the LETHAL Ladies films. No Dona Speir, no Cynthia Brimhall, and no Abilene that can't shoot straight. We do have Penhall back, this time in Dallas with Mark Barriere (who had a small part in Fit to Kill) and Suzi Simpson, trying to take down drug kingpin Rodrigo Obregon. The problem is, a crooked member of the agency is standing in their way, and gets them suspended. As you can imagine, this isn't enough for Obregon, so he calls in assassin Jewel Panther (Julie Strain) and they go into the woods of Louisiana where our trio is camping out. At the same time, our trio thinks they may have found some long lost Confederate soldier gold. They're all on a collision course to wackiness.
This is an interesting entry in the series. It has everything you want, plenty of bullets, bombs, and babes, but I think as a kind of reboot or refresh of the series, this newer iteration hits its stride more with Dallas Connection, mostly because Julie K. Smith gives it the energy it needed. We also don't get quite as much Strain as we'd want, but what we get is great. I do like too that it was trying to move this series in a new direction, that Fit to Kill was the end of something, and almost right away we know we're experiencing something new from the Dallas landscape instead of Hawai'i, and Mark Barriere shoots and hits his target when he and Penhall are raiding the drug operation--Penhall even tells him "nice shot." No more Abilene who can't shoot straight here. This also wasn't directed by Andy Sidaris, his son Christian takes over, but he only directs this one and Dallas Connection before Andy steps back in. I don't know that that gives this a different feel though, Christian seems to maintain his father's vision of how these things should look. There are plenty of B n' B sex scenes ("boobs n' butt"), plenty of explosions, and plenty of scenes of women changing. This may not be the best of the LETHAL Ladies films, but it's still a really fun time.
This is now 8 films for Julie Strain on the site, which doesn't sound like many, but 8 puts her in a three-way tie for second-most all time by a woman on the site with Shannon Tweed and Kathleen Kinmont, which is 34 behind Cynthia Rothrock for the most all-time. Her first appearance in the film is her driving a convertible with her hair all over the place, just letting us know she's coming, so when she gets to the Cowboy Club and a guy outside hits on her, we're ready for her to knee him in the nuts and headbutt him. I'd like to believe she's unabashedly Strain from there, but we don't quite get enough of her, because we have the story around the gold, we have Obregon's other goons, and we have Tanquil Lisa Collins's character trying to get our heroes off suspension. This is another thing that's corrected in Dallas Connection, as Strain gets after it right away in that one. Still, she's great here, even in her limited capacity.
As I mentioned above, this is produced by Sidaris, not directed, but he still gets a tag for that production work, which gives him 10 total now. This series alone is definitely consideration for a Hall of Fame induction, and even in the capacity of executive producer, his stamp is still on it. From a DTV franchise standpoint, Bloodfist is the only other one in its realm, but these are iconic in a way that the Bloodfist films aren't. If you say "a Sidaris film," people know right away what you mean, and the fact that these are all on Tubi in all their glory is fantastic. When I was younger, these were either on a premium channel on cable--which I would only get as a free preview--or when I got older, there were edited versions on TBS after a midnight airing of Road House. I still get reminders of that time when I see the opening titles in that classic Sidaris typefont, telling us Bruce Penhall and Julie Strain are in the film, only now I'm not wasted and trying to get the room to stop spinning. Here's to you Mr. Sidaris, you truly were one of the greatest for giving us these films.
The United States is a big country, both population-wise and land-wise, and films like this remind me that even someone who's spent his whole life here doesn't really know it as well as you'd think, because it's so big. For example, in this film, the characters go from Dallas, Texas to the Shreveport, Louisiana area, which seems like they should be far apart, but they're less than 3 hours away from each other. Part of it I think is my Northeast bias, but even then, when I was growing up, I had no idea that Philadelphia and New York City were so close, and they aren't as far away as Dallas and Shreveport are from Kittery, Maine. But I imagine people in Dallas can't believe that Kittery, Maine is so close to Boston, Massachusetts, or that it's as close to Providence, Rhode Island as Dallas is from Shreveport. That's why I watch Sidaris films though, to get more in touch with my sense of American geography.
That felt like it could've been the seventh paragraph, so what could I be adding here? It's the fact that in between the last two times I've seen this, I've actually visited Dallas myself. One of the nights I was there I caught a Texas Rangers baseball game, and on the Lyft ride back I got to see this view of the city at night. For people who haven't been before, it's the fourth largest metro area in the US, but it's not like the three cities above it, New York, LA, and Chicago. My Lyft driver told me, it can't decide if it wants to be Atlanta or LA or New York, but I also got the sense that it could've been a real world city like New York or Chicago, but the state of Texas couldn't let that happen. Texas wants to be too provincial to have a world city--or maybe it's afraid of what losing some of that provincialness by having a world city would mean. We're seeing similar struggles in Florida and Georgia with Miami and Atlanta growing, and the people in those states afraid of the same thing Texans were afraid of with Dallas. What you get with them is this uniquely American thing. Dallas feels like it could be a New York or Chicago, but it also feels like it can't, and I don't know that there's anything more American than that--which makes it a great place to set a Sidaris film.
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Tubi, which is probably the best way. There's also the Mill Creek DVD, which, if you get that, means you won't have to worry if Tubi ever takes it down--which they've done before. It may not be the best entry in the series, but it's still a lot of fun.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106819
And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.
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