Street Crimes has Michael Worth as a rookie detective working with a grizzled veteran in Dennis Farina. When they bust Ron Yuan, and Yuan challenges Worth to a fight, Worth takes him up on it, so they get after it at an old gym in a bad part of LA. Worth wins, but it leads to a lot of other local criminals wanting their own piece of an LAPD detective. These public fights have a positive effect on the community, which is bad for the crack dealing business, so local drug kingpin Gerardo (not the singer, played by James T. Morris) kidnaps Worth's girlfriend, who is also Farina's daughter, to try to get him to stop the fights. Will Worth cave, or fight back?
This is a top 20 PM flick for me (in fact, as I'm writing this it's slotted right in at 20 on my PM Entertainment Letterboxd list, which you can find a link to on our left sidebar). It has a lot of what you want in a PM flick, starting with the great beginning where Michael Worth is buying a car from a dealership that gets robbed, because car dealerships tend to keep tens of thousands of dollars in a safe--hey, if a car costs $15,000 but the buyer only has $20,000, you need to make change!--and the two car salesmen are killed, one crashing through a glass window, then our hero starts taking them out, which causes the leader of the gang to escape in the Bronco Worth wanted to buy, by crashing it through the storeroom window. That's PM for you, as is the next scene where veteran cop Max Gail is razzing Worth about it. No, "hey, you almost died" or "hey, two people were gunned down, that's horrible" nope, it's razzing about how the baddie got away. Now this doesn't have the explosions or car chases you'd want from PM--in fact, said flaming stuntman on the cover is conspicuously absent--but the fights with Art Camacho's fight choreography are pretty stellar, plus the novelty of having Dennis Farina, adds up to a fun PM flick.
We're now at 64 PM films on the site, which sounds like a lot, but considering how many we have left to go, even at one a month it could be five or six years before we do them all. And as I said above, this one embodies a lot of what makes their stuff work. Let's be honest, the idea of this film is pretty hokey: cops and local gang members having one-off fights? But PM loads it up with technical talent, from Red Horton as stunt coordinator with "Broadway" Joe Murphy, and Scott McAboy as second assistant director, we know the action will look good, better than it probably has any business doing at this level. Same with the fights when we have Art Camacho as fight choreographer, and Michael Worth as someone who has the skills to bring it. Then they somehow manage to get Dennis Farina, who adds a further layer of quality. And finally, Rick Pepin was the cinematographer, and he makes these things look nicer. So you get this hokey, goofy idea for a film, you get these silly moments of people getting thrown through windows and whatnot, but there's this level of quality that makes the whole thing much more entertaining. It's why we love PM.
As much as Dennis Farina on the tin is what sold this on cable and video store shelves, Michael Worth (who I keep wanting to call David) is the one who's leading the film after him. This is now six films for him on the site, five as an actor, and then a writing tag for Wanted Man. Going back to that first one, US Seals II, I said the film could've used a better lead, because he had the martial arts but not the screen presence, but now that we've seen him more over the years that we've been doing the DTVC he's won me over. He was on the PM podcast with Jon Cross, the To Be the Best episode, where talks about that film and his overall time with PM. It's a great listen--plus Chris the Brain is Jon's guest, and they have a great conversation on To Be the Best. In that episode Worth gives us a sense of why we didn't get more stuff from him, from the fact that the PM people may not have been happy he made Fists of Iron with Richard Munchkin, to the fact that he was turning down martial arts films because he wanted to get into more dramatic roles. It's what makes those interviews so great, because we can speculate on why an actor didn't do more stuff or why they ended up in more DTV, but when we can hear it from the actor themselves that's even better.
In true PM fashion, this film touches on some bigger societal issues, but like just enough to touch on them, not dwell on them. A big one here is LAPD's aggressive policing, which was big in the news at that time after the Rodney King beating--Max Gail even jokes to a group of local young gang members that cops have to be careful about beating perps up due to the proliferation of cameras now. At that point he and another gang member get into a heated back and forth about who's worse, the gang member terrorizing his community, or the police officers who are supposed to protect that community. Just when you think they may come to some kind of understanding, or maybe the film will take the point further, Worth and Farina check in on them and start laughing. "Oh that Max Gail, getting into it with these kids! What are we gonna do with him?" Hilarious! But again, it's pure PM, bring it up enough to let us know they considered it and didn't ignore it, but don't let it impede the overall action. When you think about it from a cable TV standpoint, if you stumble upon this at the moment where Gail and a gang member are going back and forth, if it goes on too long you may change the channel. They were always cognizant of keeping their audience engaged, whether it was someone watching from start to finish, or someone tuning in in the middle.
Finally, look at Ron Yuan here. He looks like an edgy 90s pop star, Gerardo-esque yes (and I mean the real one, not the character in this with the same name), but you can see it also in the guy in When in Rome who had hair, Andre from the first season of The Real World, and any number of Hair Band guys who were moving into a post Hair Band reality. I think the big difference between Yuan's look and the classic look is the black T-shirt, when it was usually white; also, you can't see it here, but the jeans don't really fit the usual light-washed denim common to this look. But the hair, black leather jacket, and black cowboy boots are all it. It was this thing that existed in the early 90s for a blip, kind of like the frosted tips look at the end of the 90s, but for some reason this look here didn't endure in the zeitgeist the way the frosted tips did--perhaps because this was at the beginning of the decade, making it too early for younger Millennials who claim to remember seeing Clinton play the sax on Arsenio Hall when they were 3 years old, something as authentically early 90s like this would've escaped them, and now only exists in movies and music videos. The other piece that was true to the look was the black cowboy boots, which had to have been dangerous for Yuan in his foot chase with Worth, because he had to be slipping all over the place. I know, because my buddy had those black cowboy books, and he had trouble fleeing with us after we'd egg someone's house. These guys really put their bodies on the line to make these films for us, this is just another example, and they should be applauded.
And with that, let's wrap this up. This is currently on Prime, Plex, and Fawesome, plus it's got a nice quality YouTube upload that you can find on our channel's PM Entertainment playlist. If you haven't seen it, you need to; and if it's been a while, you're probably due for a rewatch.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105485/
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