Crackerjack 2 aka Hostage Train (1997)

This is one I'd been meaning to cover for a long time. It feels like one the site was made for, so the fact that we're this far in and haven't done it is a bit of an oversight. To rectify that, I started with a podcast on it, episode 158, with guest Todd Liebenow from Forgotten Filmcast; and now we're circling back to get it a review here. This is also a Superfecta Film, as Bulletproof, Comeuppance, and the Video Vacuum have all covered this as well.

Crackerjack 2 has Judge Reinhold taking over from Thomas Ian Griffith as the lead. Wait, what? Not only that, he's dating Carol Alt. Still sufficiently cop on the edge, when he finds out the train of rich people Alt is hosting is the target of a terrorist group, he needs to do everything he can to stop them. As the fly in the ointment, he's going to grimace, awe-shucks, and neck-break his way to victory.

What else is there to say? What else isn't there to say? This is everything you'd want from a Judge Reinhold-led Die Hard rip-off loosely connect sequel to a made-for-TV Die Hard rip-off, but what does that mean? Did you even know you wanted that? And if you did, what would your expectations be? Yet I guess this meets them? Here's a good metaphor. In the mid-2000s I went to a camp in Maine with some friends, and one of them brought a can of cheese whiz. At the local grocery store I'd picked up a container of raspberry jelly rolls--or "jelly death rolls" as someone there called them. I don't remember what prompted it, whether it was a dare, or I was trying to gross someone out, but I unrolled one of those jelly death rolls, sprayed in some cheese whiz, rolled it back up, and ate it. What I got was two tastes that didn't mingle--the jelly death roll was one thing, the cheese was another. That's what this movie is, cheese whiz sprayed into a jelly death roll, and while it doesn't work, the mere concept of it is enough to get some laughs like I did.

Let's start with Reinhold. What makes him so fantastic in Fast Times as Ridgemont High is the same thing that makes him cheese whiz sprayed into a jelly death roll here. The grimacing and funny faces, the awe-shucks demeanor as he's breaking someone's neck or fighting them with no pants on--more on that later--but then trying to turn it into cop on the edge and make it work. It's not just that they're deconstructing the cop on the edge or the Die Hard rip-off fly in the ointment, or trying to turn it on its ear, it's like some molecular gastronomist trying to make a classic dish out of ingredients we wouldn't expect, and I guess in that world if it works you get a Michelin star, but here you get Crackerjack 2. And I guess the question is, do the ingredients that we wouldn't expect to work, work? When Reinhold fights a guy with no pants on, he's in briefs--not boxer briefs, but like tighty-whities--with a shirt that comes down over them. That look never works, but does it work in this case? Is that what we needed from a Reinhold-led actioner? And then when it ends, with the guy trying to stab him, and Reinhold dodging and guiding the blade into his CRT computer monitor, which causes the guy to be electrocuted, is that an octopus lolly pop, or a deep-fried Hollandaise sauce on a deconstructed eggs Benedict? Maybe, right?

Back to that idea of men being naked from the waist down, what is it about that that's so off-putting? And yes, Reinhold is wearing tighty-whities, but the image is roughly the same with the T-shirt draped down over his legs. Is it just because I generally don't find men physically attractive? Because with women I do find that look to be very sexy, but I also think it's more conducive to a woman's shape. Is that it, if Judge Reinhold were more curvy and less boxy like a guy, would it have worked? And the thing is, I'm not saying it didn't work, in the context of this film and what a Judge Reinhold-led Die Hard rip-off should be, I almost feel like it does, and maybe the knife through the CRT monitor electrocution is the ingredient my cheese whiz and jelly death roll stunt was missing to pull the whole dish together. So I'm watching something that's off-putting, something that my entire life experience on this planet has told me is off-putting, and I almost want to avert my eyes, but I see it through, and when the scene ends, it's like John Wick in the fourth movie when Laurence Fishburne asks him if he's ready, and he just says "yeah." Judge Reinhold as the lead in a Die Hard rip-off sequel to a Die Hard rip-off fighting a guy while he's got no pants on, culminating in the baddie stabbing the CRT monitor of a computer and getting electrocuted? Yeah.

There are so many other elements of the movie that I could mention, but do they matter? Like the Eurotrash baddies, complete with the femme fatale in shiny pants? We've seen it so many times before, it's not worth devoting any time to. Carol Alt as the leading guy's lady, we could swap her out for any number of models from that time, like Kathy Ireland, and it would've worked as well--not that Carol Alt was bad or anything, it's just that the character didn't have much more going on. Even the basic premise, Die Hard in a train tunnel to get rich people to give the terrorists their money, was pretty contrived, including the money being put on a CD-R and Reinhold getting his hands on it. None of it matters the way that Judge Reinhold as the lead does, and I was trying to think of other names we could use today if we wanted to remake this, but I'm not sure if they would work. Johnny Galecki? Jason Biggs? Topher Grace? Do any of them have the Reinhold-ian sensibility that makes this work in spite of its cheese whiz and jelly death roll construction--or rather, not in spite of, but because of. This might be this kind of one-off unicorn in the low-budget action world, a strange alchemy that can never be duplicated.

Finally, look at that outfit Reinhold is wearing there. How old is he supposed to be? 18? That's what I wore to parties in college, only my jeans were wider-legged. Did the costume designer go to a skateboard park at the time for inspiration? And the thing is, this is pre the tighty-whities scene, it's like the amuse bouche at the Michelin-starred molecular gastronomy restaurant, maybe a menu that you can eat, and you're like "this is going to be a fun experience--Reinhold dressed like a kid 25 years younger than himself, I can't wait to see where it goes from here!" And then the server comes to your table 20 minutes later and drops off a plate of Reinhold pantsless fighting a baddie and you're like "maybe I should've told them I have dietary restrictions so they could've replaced this with something else," but hey, they have that Michelin star for a reason, right? And by the time the credits roll, when you're getting up to leave, it's like "I don't know what I just ate, but it was kinda good. At least it was a fun, unique experience, better than just going to the usual restaurants we go to." And then, best of all, because it's on Tubi, the server lets everyone know the meal was on the house.

And maybe that's the ultimate decider with this. The molecular gastronomy restaurant is a lot more fun when it's free, and since you can get this free on Tubi, I think it's a no-brainer. What this should be or shouldn't be, I can't say, but it is what it is--perhaps the only time using that expression is apt--and because it is, it's an experience worth having. And don't forget to check out the podcast episode we did on this, number 158 in the archives, where we try to make further sense of things.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119317

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Frankenhooker (1990)

Back in April on episode 156 of the podcast, we had Freddie Young from Full Moon Reviews on to discuss this horror classic. I'd been meaning to get more horror on both the site and pod, and also been meaning to get more of Frank Henenlotter's stuff on, so that worked out on both scores. It was also great to get his take on how New York City has changed since this film was released. In addition to us, Freddie covered this on his site, Full Moon Reviews, as well.

Frankenhooker is about a guy named Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) from New Jersey whose fiancee Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) is chopped apart in a horrific lawnmower accident. Unable to move on, he tries to piece her back together, and then develops a process to bring her back to life. Unfortunately, they couldn't find all of her body parts, so he needs to get some new ones. Who better than some ladies of the night plying their trade in Times Square? After he accidentally kills a bunch of them with some explosive crack, he takes the spare parts back to his lab to reanimate his fiancee--but when he does, will he like the results?

This is the classic you expect it to be, it hits all the right notes. It has the late 80s/early 90s feel you want; the goofy, sick, twisted humor from a horror comedy that is equal parts macabre and hilarious; but then also this novel concept that works even considering how crazy it is. I loved the scene after the fiancee's death, when Jeffrey is watching the news and a reporter is interviewing a police detective who's describing the process of trying to find all her body parts as "she's just one big jigsaw puzzle." As the name implies, this is also an homage to Frankenstein, and Henenlotter does a great job with that as well, mixing what was then a modern 1990's setting with the schlock horror films of the 50s and 60s that he grew up with. One of the best scenes is when he reanimates Elizabeth, the mix of animation and practical effects, it looks great, but also doesn't betray the camp and humor this is going for. This one is a classic for a reason, and well worth the watch.

It's been awhile since I've seen Basket Case or Brain Damage, but I think out of the three, I like this one best. The budget was a little bigger, Henenlotter was more experienced as a director, and the concept was more novel and interesting--and was executed better, which always helps. As much of a classic as this is though, and as big a name as Henenlotter has in the horror world, he doesn't have many other feature film credits to his name. Just this, Brain Damage, three Basket Case movies, and in 2008 a film called Bad Biology. Since then he's done a few documentaries, the last one coming in 2018, and that's it. The good news is though, all of his feature films are available on free streamers, with everything but Bad Biology on Tubi, and that one on Plex.

We always talk about New York City being its own character in a film, and Henelotter was one of the best to use the city that way. What's interesting is just how much it's changed since 1990 when this was made. Times Square is not a place where people can engage sex workers, it's tourist trap where you can get pictures with Marvel characters and have lunch at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. or Olive Garden. When Franken asks a guy where his fiancee ran off to, and the guy responds in Swedish, he says "You're speaking to me in Swedish in Times Square!", because back then the idea of tourists going to Times Square was unfathomable. For me, I never saw that earlier incarnation, my first trip to Times Square was in 2014 when my wife and I had a layover at Penn Station between trains, and she took me there so I could see it. That's one thing that was great about having Fred on the pod to discuss this, he's a lifelong resident of NYC, so he's seen the changes and could speak to it better. Maybe that's why Henenlotter doesn't make movies anymore, New York is no longer the New York he knew--though I would love to see a sequel to this where Elizabeth is in Times Square interacting with tourists in jorts and fanny packs.

This was a Troma release, so we have the Troma opening, which is one of the best for me. Ty from Comeuppance and I were talking about this, how there aren't as many iconic low-budget releasing and production company openings as there used to be. Cannon, PM, Vestron, Imperial--I could go on, but like Troma, they give you a comfort food feeling that gets you in the right frame of mind before you start your film, as opposed to the current DTV climate where you may have anywhere from 6-8 companies before the film starts, all as indistinguishable from the one before it, engendering a sense of cynicism that puts you in the wrong frame of mind and makes the film work uphill before it even starts. The other thing about Troma is they've been a victim of the changing New York we were talking about in the previous paragraph, priced out of Hell's Kitchen and forced to move to Long Island City in Queens. When I started the site, I expected to have more Troma, but with the way the action reviews blew up, Troma was left behind, and now we're 1250-plus posts in and this is only their 12th tag. I always say "we'll have to work on fixing that," but I never seem to get around to it, so I'll leave at as Troma is one of the all-time greats, and the DTV and low budget film world wouldn't be what it is without them.

Finally, in the opening scene, before Elizabeth is cut up by the lawnmower, Elizabeth, Jeffrey, and her mother are in the house, when her mother says "I need to make my cole slaw." It was a reminder of how much things have changed since this came out, when my initial thought was "she's going to dump a bunch of pre-cut ingredients from a bag into a bowl," and instead saw her pull out a big head of cabbage and start cutting. Yes Matt, at one time--and within your lifetime--that's how cole slaw was made, it wasn't bought pre-cut at the grocery store. The thing is though, I love the pre-cut stuff. I guess the kids would call it a "hack," but I saute it with my onions, mushrooms, and tofu when I'm making fried rice. Mix in some soy sauce and rice vinegar, and it's perfect. 

With that, I think it's time to wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi, which I think is a great way to watch it--though if you're a collector and you don't have this, it's one you should add. This is the fun horror classic romp you came for, great for a bad movie night with friends. And if you haven't yet, you can check out the podcast episode I did with Fred from Full Moon Reviews, number 156 in the archives.

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

The Gardener (2021)

This is it, we're finally covering The Gardiner on here, and finally getting Gary Daniels into the 60 Club with Dolph--who's technically in the 70 Club, but who's counting? In addition to us, The guys at Comeuppance and Todd Gaines at Bulletproof have covered this too.

The Gardener has the Bronson-faced Robert Bronzi as our eponymous hero, tending the garden for a rich family of Brits pretending to be Americans while living in England--at least that's the best explanation for why the family are all UK actors playing Americans while living in the UK. Anyway, at the same time Gary Daniels plays Volker, a baddie who runs a crew of guys who steal things from people's homes. After a recent break-in turns into a home invasion and double homicide, Volker wants this job done right. But when the daughter of the family decides to join her boyfriend during the holiday instead of travel with her family, they cancel their trip, leaving them ripe for these baddies when they break-in. Unfortunately for the baddies though, as their home invasion unfolds, the Gardiner has other plans for them.

What is there to say about this one? It's a home invasion movie that tries to pad out the home invasion by taking its time to get there, and does a decent job of it. Then they use the Three Stooges "there's a man in a gorilla suit taking everyone out in a mansion" paradigm, only here Bronzi as said guy in a gorilla suit--sans gorilla suit unfortunately, because that would've made this movie a ten!--is killing everyone, instead of tying them up and putting them in a closet for laughs. My one complaint would be that I'd like more Daniels, but when you see Bronzi's fighting, you realize pairing him with Daniels wouldn't work if they did it too much, so they have to save it for the end. I guess that's a good way to mitigate it. There were also weird decisions, like setting the film in the UK, and using all UK actors, but having the actors playing the family members play them as Americans. Why would you need to do that? Let everyone be Brits, that's my motto.

We finally got Daniels to the 60 Club, but we made it a year late, because he's now 61, which means Dolph remains the only actor on the site to have more films than his age. And a big reason for that was how hard this was to get on a free streamer. I guess I could've paid for it, but I got the sense from the trailer that this wasn't worth rental money, and I was right about that, this is more a good value for a free streamer or a streaming service you're already subscribed to. The thing is, he's had two films released since this one, Bring Him Back Dead and Repeater, which are both on Tubi, and it feels like this film was made for Tubi, but how can you know in the current streaming climate--though to be fair, this was on Tubi for like a week, then mysteriously was removed. After that it was on Prime for like two weeks, and then too was mysteriously removed, only to be as mysteriously restored, and I figured at that point I couldn't mess around. As far as a Daniels film goes, I think this is around the middle of his movies. It could've been worse, but we've also seen better from him. What I liked was how present he was. At this stage of his career he could start mailing in small cameos like his fellow stars, but he's not doing that, and I think I appreciate that in this film more than anything.

We're finally getting a Robert Bronzi film on the site, and it took Daniels to get us there. He really does look a lot like Bronson, and while he really isn't Bronson the way we understand Bronson with his screen presence, he does a good enough job here giving you Bronson-enough, if that makes sense? Like he's not just a look-alike, he's trying to channel him, which works enough in a movie like this that can use that kind of energy. I wouldn't want to see him in something like a remake of Death Wish--or hell even Death Wish V--but in the same way that Tito Ortiz can give you a cheap Vin Diesel, or Gruner or Bernhardt can approximate Van Damme, Bronzi works enough to punch up a DTV on-the-cheap UK production, which when you add in a name like Daniels, it can get you to the church on time. Speaking of Ortiz, it looks like he has a film with him coming up, which should be fun. Why not just do a whole Expendables movie with clones? I think there's a market for that--which is probably just us, but we're enough of a market... I think.

The only other name in this I recognized was Sarah T. Cohen, but I couldn't figure out from what, and when I looked her up on IMDb, I hadn't seen any of her films. Then I realized, she had been in films that starred, or were directed by or written by, people who were in films I'd reviewed. For example, she's done a few films written by friend of the site and podcast guest Tom Jolliffe. A lot of the films he does as more of a gun for hire like that are shot in the UK but made for American audiences, so all of the cast need to pull out their best American accents, like Cohen and the other family members do in this. She's had to play Americans so much that on her IMDb page she has an American accent demo reel. I guess it makes sense if the movie is marketed to Americans, but something like this that's more international, and actually set in England, I don't really get it--unless for Cohen and the other actors playing family members, a selling point was adding another clip to their American accent demo reel. "Hey, we can't pay you a lot for this, but we'll make the family Americans so you can further show the world how great your American accent is!" "My agent's telling me to take, fine."

Finally, this might be it for Daniels for a while, because after this film we have two Christian movies, a few foreign films, a 3-hour Bruce Lee biopic, and some film called A Stranger in Paradise that I can't seem to find. If you add all that up, if I were do do them all, that's only seven films--and I don't know how much any of them outside of A Stranger in Paradise I want to review--meaning he can't catch Dolph's 70. On the other hand, Art Camacho is at 52, and he probably has enough work out there to catch Daniels, but the next actor after him is Rothrock at 43, and I don't know that she has 17 films that haven't been reviewed in order to catch Daniels, so he's safe at two. Going into making the DTVC, I would've expected Dolph to have the most films, but I had no idea Daniels would not only be the second-most, but the second-most by an unreachable margin. 60 films is a big deal, and deserves its due. Here's to you Mr. Daniels, you're one of the greatest to ever do it.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can get this on Prime, but that can change really quickly, as we've seen over the past couple years. It's worth it as a Daniels film on a free streamer, or a streaming service you already have, but I don't know if you need to rent it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11217036

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Top Gunner (2020)

This is a film Ty from Comeuppance and I looked at on the pod when we did our Eric Roberts double feature back in April. That's episode 154 in the archives. As far as I can tell, no one else has touched this one. Maybe with good reason?

Top Gunner has Eric Roberts as an officer in the Air Force who has a training base for pilots in a remote location. When some of them cause trouble, he forces them to stay during the holiday weekend while everyone else is on leave. After a special forces team grabs a Russian bioweapon with the intent of getting it to scientists in Washington so they can reverse engineer a cure, they need to make a pit stop at Roberts's base. The problem is, the Russians are hot on their tail, and have waylaid them there. Will Roberts's rag tag group trouble-making trainees be able to fend off the Russians?

This isn't horrible, but there is a sense of, what am I doing here? They set up some corrugated iron shacks near an old abandoned highway, CGI'd in some planes, then tossed in a dash of Eric Roberts. Is that it for The Asylum now? This is their Top Gun: Maverick mockbuster? But then there's also a sense of "what did you want this to be, Matt?" which I also get, and I think if pressed, this is probably about what I expected, and the fact that I can at least say it isn't horrible is saying something--even if it's not saying much. The Asylum is like getting the generic Doritos, and I think there's always that first bite where I go in expecting real Doritos, and end up a little disappointed, when I only have myself to blame for not ponying up the extra couple bucks to just get Doritos.

There are three of these films, and I believe that's because this was supposed to be released to coincide with Top Gun: Maverick, but that film was delayed so much that they had to put out another movie in order to capitalize, and then once they did that they figured they might as well do a third. The second one doesn't have Roberts, but the third one does, and none of the three have anything to do with each other. This is now 36 films for The Asylum, which means they're close to one of the more exalted clubs at the DTVC, the 40 Club. On the one hand, it seems wrong to have them in a club like that--wrong enough that they're in the Hall of Fame even--but on the other, they've been doing this Mockbuster thing a couple years longer than we've been doing the DTVC, and they're still going strong...(ish). I think that has to count for something, and for that I applaud them.

Eric Roberts, who is known for his vast CV, is only at 16 films now on the site, which doesn't sound right, but when you look at the films he does and who's--or rather who isn't--in them, you get a better sense of why he's only where he's at. Is there anyone who's better at ranting with the wall of a corrugated iron shed behind him? Like were they borrowing a trailer on a construction site to do his scenes? When his wife called him about this, he was probably like "how many locations and how many wardrobe changes?" and she said "one location, no wardrobe changes, you're wearing an Air Force pilot jumpsuit the whole time." "So I gotta unzip my shirt to go to the bathroom?" "It's just one day of shooting." And like the trooper he is, he delivered.

One thing The Asylum got right was the fact that fighter jet dogfights can only get you so far, so they were smart to pad things out with this other plot about the bioweapon. The problem is, the other plot was kind of a dud too. What the movie should've been was 80 minutes of Eric Roberts in a corrugated iron shed yelling at young trainees. But then the problem there is, you can't get that much footage out of Roberts with the limited time you have to shoot with him. Could you loop it then? Like the same rant, over and over, maybe set to a Vaporwave soundtrack, and the trainees, when they're not flying CGI planes, they're struggling to get AOL and Windows 95 to work. I'm just throwing ideas out here, but I do kinda feel like my idea would be the best Asylum film ever.

 
Finally, even The Asylum isn't immune to the trend of not using numbers for sequels. Can we blame them though, when they're Mockbustering Hollywood, and that's what Hollywood's doing? I would love to see them full-on Mockbuster that. Like make the movie I described above, but call it "Herring: A Top Gunner Saga." If you're wondering, they did do their own Mockbusters for Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, called Road Wars and Road Wars: Max Fury, which is okay, but I feel like it's a bit of a mail-in from The Asylum. Why not go with Max Fury: A Road Wars Saga? Come on guys, you're slipping.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is almost exactly what you'd expect from an Asylum Mockbuster on Top Gun: Maverick--maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but almost exactly. If you need a little Eric Roberts on a free streamer to pass the time, you could do worse than this. You could do better too, but you could do worse.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12226808

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.