The Power Within has Ted Jan Roberts as Stan, a high school junior not living up to his potential. He could be so much better at school, martial arts, and getting a date to the prom if he only tried harder. At the same time, William Zabka has stolen a ring that makes him very powerful, and Gerald Okamura, holder of the other ring, doesn't want Zabka to get both. Unfortunately, Zabka kills him, but before he dies, he gives his ring to Stan, and tells him that as powerful as this ring is, his true power lies within. Now shit is really happening for Stan, his grades are up, Sandy's (Tracy Melchior) going to the prom with him, and he beat up a blackbelt in karate class. The problem is he still needs to deal with Zabka.
What a great time this one was. A big part of it was the cast, where they just loaded this thing up with a ton of fun performances. In addition to the names I mentioned above, we had John O'Hurley as a police detective, Karen Valentine as Roberts's mother, PJ Soles as Melchior's mother, and a Don "The Dragon" Wilson cameo playing himself. Then we have some fantastic fights, choreographed by Camacho and Roberts, that all looked great as well. From a PM movie standpoint, I would say there were only a couple moments that were pure PM. First is when Zabka is in a high-speed chase with the henchmen of a crime boss that want the ring back from him and some police officers, one of the cop cars goes flying over the top of a city bus, with explosions and everything; and second, when Roberts is being held in O'Hurley's office after a big fight, he needs to escape to rescue Melchior, who's being held by Zabka, and instead of going through the door, he crashes through a window. That's gotta be a PM motto: "Why use a door when there's a perfectly good window you can crash through." If you can find this, I think it's a fun one and worth checking out.
60 films for Art Camacho, of which 13 are director credits, including this one. It's a huge milestone, after Dolph, Cole S. McKay, and Gary Daniels, he's only the fourth person to the 60 Club, and I think it just speaks to his work ethic. The interview he did on the PM Entertainment Podcast episode for A Dangerous Place (which yours truly was also a guest on) really gets into that, where he talks about all the ways he seized various opportunities PM gave him to work in their movies, including directing films like this. The result is that we as fans of the genre ultimately are the winners, because we have a lot of fun movies like this to watch due to his talent and work ethic. When I look at his bio, beyond the fact that we have five more movies that he's directed to review on here, he still has a ton of stuff that he worked on in various capacities to cover, so the 60 Club is just the start, but it's well-deserved too. Here's to you Mr. Camacho, you're one of the great ones.
On a more somber note, since our last Ted Jan Roberts post, Magic Kid, we've learned that he passed away in 2022. Really sad for anyone to pass away that young, but with Roberts, seeing him in something like this, there's a sense of what could've been. He and I were born in the same year, so it maybe gives me a different perspective, but one thing I do notice in watching action movies is they tend to like older men in the leads. Take Scott Adkins, who turned 50 this year, he really didn't start getting the big leading roles until he was in his 30s. Even something like Special Forces had Marshall Teague in the lead. And maybe that was the issue in the 2000s, he was too old for kids and teen roles like this, but too young to take the next step in his action film career, leaving this gap that he may have been able to pick back up on in the late 2000s/early 2010s, but by then it was too late it seems. And maybe even more tragic, we're seeing an influx of films featuring 90s action leads again, so depending on how his martial arts skills were, he could've probably found roles in this new ecosystem. Again, it was really sad news, he'll truly be missed.
We'll use this paragraph to round up the rest of the names in this. First off, it's our 62nd PM Entertainment flick on the site, so we're really starting to make our way through their catalog. My PM Entertainment Letterboxd list is live again, so you can check that out and see where I put this. As I said above, this is 70 films for Cole S. McKay, so we'll be doing a special 70 Club post for him in the near future. I know we'll be doing at least one movie he did stunts on between now and then, but who knows, he may have even more before we get to that post, because he's in so many films doing stunt work. Speaking of clubs, 40 Club member Don "The Dragon" Wilson has 45 films now with this one-scene cameo as himself. That puts him two behind Cynthia Rothrock for third-most all time as an actor, but she has a movie in the can that I'll be reviewing this week, so that gap will widen again. We also have Gerald Okamura in back-to-back weeks, now putting him at 21 films on the site. He's another one that appears in a ton of stuff, so who knows how many more films of his we'll do, but he was great here as Roberts's ancient sensei and previous ring holder. I can't believe I'm almost to the end of the paragraph and haven't yet mentioned how great William Zabka was as the main baddie. Chewing scenery all over the place, just having a great time, he played a big part in why this film worked. Finally, John O'Hurley of Seinfeld fame was in this as the detective, our second time seeing him on the site after Mirror Images. No love scenes for him here, though there was a burgeoning romance between him and Karen Valentine as Roberts's mother.
Finally, we had a few scenes with a chimp in this one. At the end of the credits there was the mention that no animals were harmed in making this film, but I beg to differ, because the only humane way to have a chimp in your film is to not have one, or now with the technology we have, make them with CGIs. You've heard me on this crusade before, but chimps are particularly egregious in my mind, because they share 97% of our DNA. Forget putting them in movies, they shouldn't be in zoos or be had as pets either. To give you a sense of how close to humans they are, there's currently a chimpanzee war in Uganda between two factions that split apart, lopsided in favor of one faction over the other, leading to a lot of deaths. There's actually a Netflix documentary on this that's narrated by Mahershala Ali if you want to know more. So let's leave chimps alone to be chimps, our movies and zoos will be fine without them; and considering it's illegal to keep humans as pets, it should be illegal to have chimps as pets too.
And with that, let's wrap this up. I found this on YouTube, and while it's not the best quality, it'll get you to the church on time. Hopefully as more of these PM flicks are finding their ways to streamers, this one will as well, because I had a lot of fun with it.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114171/
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