Lights Out (2024)

This is one Ty and I covered back on episode 162 of the podcast, our "Dermot Mulroney Double Feature" episode, almost a year ago now, and I've been meaning to get it on the site as well. Beyond the Adkins factor, we've been meaning to get more Grillo on the site too--or fire up the Grillo, as we like to say here. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof has covered this as well.

Lights Out has Grillo as a former soldier who has just left the service, and is looking for work. After beating up Kevin Gage and some other ne'er-do-wells at a bar, he catches the attention of Mekhi Phifer, who gets him involved in the underground fight game. But it turns out Phifer's sister is into mob guy Sage (Dermot Mulroney) and the cop who's working with him, Glenn Close (Jaime King), because her abusive ex-boyfriend hid a duffle bag full of money at her house, and they want it back. Now Grillo doesn't just need to win some fights, but he needs to bring these baddies down, and to help him do it is old Army buddy Scott Adkins. Will he prevail?

This isn't horrible. It's directed by Christian Sesma, and his films have a higher floor, which helps in this sea of options we have on places like Tubi and Hulu. I think from a story standpoint, there's a lot going on, which hampers it a bit. The concept itself is one of those I'd say has enough material for an episode of a syndicated action show, and there are two ways to get something with that much material from 42 minutes to 90s minutes: you pad the hell out of it, or you add a bunch of stuff, and this one went for the latter. Still, the fights were good, Grillo gives us another solid lead, Phifer, JuJu Chen, and Mulroney were fun, we had the novelty of an Adkins appearance, plus Jaime King was playing Glenn Close! (More on that later.) Overall, this is a fun 90-minute time killer.

We're now at five Grillo films on the site, which isn't a lot when you consider how much DTV stuff he's done, but when you look at it all, he doesn't co-star with a lot of names like Adkins or Dolph, he tends to be the star power himself, which means we need to carve out specific reviews for him, something that I think will come more often as we start to finish off some of the old guard--though if they keep making movies at the rates they've been, it may not be as easy. We do have two others of his in the can right now, Black Lotus and A Day to Die, plus I'm looking forward to Hounds of War finally being available on streaming. What we get here is more confirmation that Grillo is a great lead in these movies, and with the baddies we've seen him play, he's someone who can slot into a lot of different roles and elevate a DTV film beyond its budget. The other interesting thing is it looks like James Gunn's DC reboot is utilizing him more than the MCU did, which is DC's gain and Marvel's loss, but also means it could be our loss as well if his profile starts to extend further beyond the DTV realm. We'll see, but in the meantime he has a lot of DTV back catalog for us to get to.

Mr. Adkins is at 29 now, so he's on the cusp of the 30 Club. I wanted to try and get him and Michael Jai White, who's at 28, in around the same time, but with three more Adkins films I have in the can to review, he might not only get in ahead of White, but end up a few films ahead of him in the process. This is a very small role, so had he already been at 29 I would've tabled this for a bit, because it wouldn't have been worthy of his 30th film. This is the second time we've seen him in a Sesma film, the other being a small, yet larger than this, role in Section 8, which also had Dolph. He's still pumping out a few movies a year, and even though some are like John Wick 4, which we probably won't review, most of them are DTV, so once he passes the 30 Club threshold, it won't be long before he's in the 40 Club too. Even with a small role, they all count the same, so the next time we see him here he'll officially be in the 30 Club.

Christian Sesma is a director who's been on my radar for a bit, especially for films like this that have a lot of names, and a look and feel that gives them a higher floor than most modern DTV. He's far down the list of directors whose movies we've done, as this is only his third, but I see a bunch that could be reviewed which could get him closer to some of the other names sooner. He has a couple with Michael Jai White, for instance, that are definite reviews just because they have White in them. The other thing is almost all of his stuff is on either free streamers or ones I'm subscribed to, so I can move through his filmography a little quicker. Compare that to Jesse V. Johnson, who I have 8 films left to cover, but I think only three of those 8 are on streamers; or Isaac Florentine, whose most recent is still rent only, while Sesma's most recent is already on Hulu.

Finally, the kids always talk about something not being on their "bingo card," and I'd say for Ty and me when we were discussing this, Jaime King playing Glenn Close was not something we had on our bingo cards. What was the mindset there? Was it "we can't afford Glenn Close, but this should really be her part"? Or did King say "I'm only playing this part if I can play her as Glenn Close." And she's a corrupt cop, so it's an Evil Glenn Close. It just added this bonkers element to the proceedings. When she was in Out of Death or Code Name Banshee she wasn't playing Glenn Close, so it's not like this is a thing she does all the time now. I guess as a one-off I'll go with it, and maybe it makes sense, because Close is such a great actor, who wouldn't want to emulate her--even if this is a bit All About Eve if she is.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Hulu, which I think is a good deal. It has its flaws, but overall it's solid enough to get you to the church on time if you have 90 minutes to kill and you're looking for something to watch. And also remember to check out the podcast episode Ty and I did on this, number 162 in the archives, "Dermot Mulroney Double Feature."

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16368898

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Def by Temptation (1990)

This is one I'd been meaning to do for a long time, and finally covered it on the podcast back on episode 198 with Freddie Young from Full Moon Reviews, so now it's time to get it on the site. In addition to us, Outlaw Vern has covered this, plus Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, Joe Bob's Drive-In Movie Review.

Def by Temptation is about a succubus (Cynthia Bond), who is killing men who are playing women in New York City. Is it such a bad thing if she's only killing cheaters? When minister-in-training Joel (James Bond III, who also wrote and directed) goes to NYC to visit his friend K (Kadeem Hardison), he becomes the succubus's next target, so someone not-so not-innocent is now in danger. Hardison has to stop her, and fortunately he's found an ally in Dougy (Bill Nunn), the worst of the players at the bar who just happens to be an undercover cop who specializes in the occult. Will they be able to work together and save Joel before the succubus gets him?

This was a ton of fun. It's not exactly direct-to-video, because it made about $2 million in the theater, but it feels DTV, if you know what I mean. It's the kind of late-night horror you might see on cable or at the video store, something that only gets better with time. James Bond III does a great job crafting a unique yet fun and scary tale, and the robust supporting cast does their job rounding out the proceedings and adding extra weight that a low-budget horror film from 1990 may not otherwise have. Just the opening alone is fantastic, where a bartender is on the phone, cheating on his girlfriend, spitting the funniest lines in the process. Then when the succubus takes him back to her place to kill him, and he's running around buck-ass naked, it's both hilarious, and you kind of feel bad for him. You get the fun, but you also get the nuance of making sure we want to see the succubus stopped. Just an all-around great time.

I mentioned above that this was one I'd wanted to do for a long time. How long? In the early 2000s, Troma was doing a sale, and I bought Sgt. Kabukiman, NYPD, Surf Nazis Must Die, Class of Nuke 'Em High, and Toxic Avenger all for $5 a piece. I believe each of those had a trailer for this movie, with Bill Nunn's classic line, "when she drinks that holy water, she's gonna be slobberin' and fartin' and gaggin'." My buddy and I would always say "we have to watch that!", but then I don't know, the beer, the weed, the Taco Bell, the Doritos--maybe a combination of all of them?--would cause us to forget, and the movie never happened for us. This is what makes the world we live in now great. Yes, there are a lot of issues with streaming, but one of the good things is that a movie that once slipped through my fingers might now be available, and while I may need to sit through a series of commercials about online casinos, with my attention span shot anyway, it gives me a chance to look at my phone.

It turns out this is the third Samuel L. Jackson film we've done on the site. In addition to Arena, he was an uncredited extra in The Exterminator, so I need to tag that too. You'd think with how prolific he is, that he'd have more DTV stuff, but if you look at the timeline, he got the role of Nick Fury not long after we started the DTVC, so in that sense it's probably crazier that he did Arena at all than it is that he hasn't done anything else. On the other hand, this is our fourth Kadeem Hardison film, the other three being the Michael Jai White/Asylum Joint Android Cop and two Mark Dacascos films, Instinct to Kill and the all-time classic, Drive. The Jackson we get is rather scant, a bit at the beginning and a bit in the close; but the Hardison is prodigious and he's a lot of fun. A classic for both of them to be sure.

This was distributed by Troma, with Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz as executive producers. When I started this site back in 2007, Troma was a huge part of my DTV watching life, and I figured I'd have more of their films reviewed than any other company--I didn't even have PM on my radar then. But as I've said before, soon after I started, people were reaching out about the action films I was reviewing. At that time there weren't many of us doing low-budget action--and there really aren't many more now--while the horror review ecosystem was much more robust, which meant those reviews were more likely to get lost in the shuffle. Take this film for example, it has 30 critic reviews. For a somewhat obscure low-budget horror flick from 1990, 30 is a lot. A good comp might be One Man Force, a classic that came out in 1989, which only has 10 reviews, of which four are Bulletproof, Comeuppance, Explosive Action, and us. So that means we have nearly 50 PM flicks reviewed, while this is only our 13th Troma flick. I'll see what I can do about getting more up in the near future.

Finally, saxophone great Najee plays himself in this, and also performs a song. What you may not know about me is I'm a huge Smooth Jazz fan, especially if it's saxophone-led, so Najee is one that's right up there for me. I love his cover of Anita Baker's "Sweet Love," and of course, "Tokyo Blue," you could play that whole album, also called Tokyo Blue, it's great top to bottom. Another song is "All I Ever Ask," which isn't bad either, but features Freddie Jackson, who also stars in this as himself. Was this where they met before their collaboration? Another nice hit off that album Just an Illusion, he covers Color Me Badd's "I Adore Mi Amor." If you're not into Smooth Jazz, give it a try, it's not just for Weather Channel's "Weather on the 8s" anymore.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi, which I think is a good deal. It's a horror classic with some great names, really well put together by James Bond III. And also check out the podcast episode Freddie and I did on this, number 198 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099395/

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Savage Salvation (2022)

Since we discovered Cole S. McKay had over 50 films on the site back in March when we did Victim of Desire--which he was stunt coordinator on--I've been meaning to give him a proper 50 Club induction post, and I thought this would be a good one since I'd been meaning to cover it for some time as well, and he's the stunt coordinator. Let's see if it was worthy of McKay's 50 Club post.

Savage Salvation is a Randall Scandal starring Jack Huston as a guy who, with his girlfriend, Willa Fitzgerald, is addicted to heroin, but when he proposes to her, she proposes they kick, and they make a go at it. But this is a Randall Scandal, and there's always a Randall mainstay waiting in the wings to cause an issue. This time it's a be-corn-rowed Swen Temmel--Michael Sirow must've been busy--who gets Fitzgerald back on the stuff, causing her to overdose and die. Now Huston is out for blood, and he won't stop until vengeance is served. Hot on his trail is local sheriff Bob De Niro, toting an understated Southern accent and an understated mustache. He wants to get to him before the authorities do. But will he get there before Huston has killed everyone dealing heroin in the area?

This is a bit of a tough one to render a verdict on. Not a lot happens in the first 45 minutes, and while it would've been great character development in an indie film about addiction starring Huston and Fitzgerald, this ain't no Sundance entry, so that means that the 45 minutes isn't really anything that couldn't be done in 15 to get us to the action sooner, especially with an actor as good as Huston selling us on his killing spree. Also, we get a taste of the spree at the very beginning, so since we know it's coming, the 45 minutes is just prolonging the inevitable. And the spree itself isn't horrible, but it is a little over the top (Stallone style). Like when Huston starts the spree by killing Temmel, he shoots him in the eye with a nail gun, so Temmel is just sitting there with a nail in his eye. And Huston is giving him the tough "tell me where your supplier is," and instead of Temmel just screaming in pain like anyone else who just had a fucking nail shot into his eye, Temmel is whimpering and begging Huston not to kill him--with a fucking nail sticking out of his eye! What do I do with that? And what am I supposed to tell you to do with it? We had other things, like Quavo as the main baddie, who's great, but he's in one or two scenes, so totally wasted; yet this is also a Randall Scandal, we expect someone like Quavo to have limited screentime--he was probably playing poker with Scandal down in Puerto Rico where this was shot, and lost a hand and the bet required him to be in this movie. Some of the other stuff that made no sense, like when Temmel lies to Fitzgerald, telling her Huston had been using behind her back, which is what gets her to use again. Just by me living in Philly and seeing people on heroin all the time, I'd know if someone around me was using, forget a former addict like herself! Yet she just believes him. Then when she dies, instead of calling 911 like a normal person, Huston dresses her in her wedding dress and takes her to be baptized, where John Malkovich looks on, trying his best to sell the bonkers-ness. Speaking of De Niro and Malkovich, they're probably the reason Huston is in this, and I don't know whether to be amazed or disappointed by how well they're selling the bonkers-ness of the whole thing to me. Ultimately the fact that this is long is what kills it, instead of 100 minutes we needed like 80, and I think that would've better allowed us to revel in the bonkers-ness.

We're actually at 58 movies for Cole S. McKay when we're finally getting him in the 50 Club, which puts him third all-time behind Dolph and Gary Daniels, and three ahead of Art Camacho, who's now in fourth place. While this isn't one of the PM classics where McKay made a name for himself on this site, it's fun to see him plying his trade in a Randall Scandal like this in 2022 with Jack Huston, Robert De Niro, and John Malkovich. When the movie turns from an indie drama about addiction to a revenge actioner around the 45-minute mark, you can almost feel McKay take over. It's not a full-on PM-fest though, and I wonder if there weren't moments where McKay looked at the cars on-set and asked Randall Scandal "you sure you don't need me to flip one of these?" Looking over his CV on IMDb, there are dozens of other films of his that are ripe for our site, a couple of which I've already watched and am just waiting to review, so it's possible he could be in the 60 Club by the time we get him into the Hall of Fame this October, which would tie him with Gary Daniels, and down the road he could pass Dolph for the most credits all-time. And the other thing is, we just started tagging him back in March, I easily could've missed some movies we've reviewed that he worked on, so he could possibly already be in the 60 Club. It just speaks to how prolific he was, especially in the 80s-90s window that we look at as the Golden Age of DTV films, but even now he's still getting after it, working to make even a Randall Scandal like this more palatable. Here's to you Mr. McKay, you're truly one of the greatest to do it.

Part of the reason I wanted to do this is it's another Bob De Niro Randall Scandall, of which we've done two others, The Killing Season and Freelancers, and I'd say this is my favorite performance of those three. He feels a little less somnambulistic here, which on the one hand helps, but on the other watching him go through the motions to get a paycheck is part of the fun of seeing him in these. Maybe having Jack Huston and John Malkovich helped. Speaking of which, Malkovich was more engaged than we'd seen him in these before too. Could Huston's presence have rubbed off? "We want to turn in a performance worthy of the kid's grandfather" maybe? Or maybe the fact that Huston was probably excited to work with them was what rubbed off on them. Either way, I guess I did appreciate it more that De Niro and Malkovich weren't mentally picturing the new kitchen island they were getting installed with the money from this film as they were reciting their lines. As an aside, with "Huston" pronounced "HEW-ston" the way the city in Texas is pronounced, as opposed to the street in NYC, which is "HOW-ston," would Huston's name have been pronounced "HUSS-ton" if he'd been born in Manhattan?

In 2023 we reviewed the documentary The Randall Scandal: Love, Loathing, and Vanderpump, which birthed the term "Randall Scandal" that we give to all his movies now, and also call him, which may or may not be confusing. It gave us insight into how some of these Randall Scandals are made, and the abuse of people working under him that was part of the process. For example in this one, I saw that it was shot in Puerto Rico, and one of accounts from one of his assistants told how Randall demanded the assistant bring him his poker table from LA. The poor assistant had to fly it down there himself, on his own dime, and of course was never reimbursed. Knowing this kind of abuse was happening behind the scenes, there's also a question of whether I'm feeding into it by giving films like this a spotlight on my site. That's definitely something, now that we know how the sausage is made, we probably should be eating more plant-based stuff, but there's also something to be said for us using the reach we have to let people know about these movies too. I imagine a lot of people see this on Hulu and think it looks like a pretty good deal, but if they go to IMDb first, and see us among the currently 20 critic reviews, they may see us discussing how the sausage is made, and opt for a plant-based alternative themselves.

Speaking of making more humane food choices, the baddies were based at a dairy farm, where from what I could tell, the cows were pasture raised. Granted, they were just all hanging out outside the barn, it's possible when they were milked they were stuck in a concrete enclosure, and while I want to give Quavo as our baddie the benefit of the doubt, I wouldn't put it past him to be taking calves from their mothers at a young age so he can get more milk out of them too. Still, if our baddies were running a humane dairy farm, does that mitigate some of the hard feelings we have about them dealing drugs? I mean, what happened to all those cows after Huston killed everyone? Did De Niro get them adopted at a sanctuary farm? Or did they get shipped to a factory farm, forced to live their lives confined to a small space on a concrete floor? I imagine any vegans are reading this saying "there's no such thing as humane dairy, Matt, unless it's plant-based." So in that sense, maybe I shouldn't be giving our baddies the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps if the baddies were holed up at an almond farm, and Huston used those for cover the way he used the cows for cover when he attacked them. It could've been Randall Scandal's nod to A Midsummer Night's Dream, right?

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Hulu here in the States, plus I've seen it on DVD at Target, which is a rarity for a movie we're covering here. It's a bit long, and suffers from a bit of an identity crisis, but the bonkers-ness of a Randall Scandal combined with some of the names may get you over the hump. And congratulations to Cole S. McKay and his entry into the 50 Club! It was a long time coming, but good to finally give him that recognition for all his great work.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13055982/

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

A Hard Place (2025)

Filmmaker J. Horton reached out to see if we could cover his newest film, A Hard Place, and I was more than happy to oblige. Trap is one of his I really enjoyed, and his most recent film before this, Craving, came out really well, so I was excited to see how this one did. 

A Hard Place follows a group of criminals who, after a big score, need to lie low for a bit, so they find their way out to the country to wait for their contact to show up and help them get out of dodge. Unfortunately, as they're waiting, these green tree monsters show up and start eating some of them. Fortunately though, a group of locals are all too willing to help, which is nice, except, could these nice locals have ulterior motives? It's getting to where you can't trust anyone anymore! Among the criminals there's Fish (Rachel Amanda Bryant) who doesn't seem like a criminal as much as someone caught up in a bad situation, and among the locals there's Naja (Ashley Undercuffler) who may not be as untrustworthy as the others. Will they manage to survive all this when the shit hits the fan?

This was a great time. A nice mix of gothic horror and zombie/monster movies, with some offbeat dark humor that manages to work tonally with the rest of the film and doesn't feel out of place--not an easy needle to thread, but Horton and company managed to pull it off. There were a couple elements that didn't work for me though. I thought there were too many characters to keep track of, and I would've preferred if the story focused more on Bryant and Undercuffler's characters, but I think those are more personal tastes on my end, and I get why Horton decided to go in a different direction. And with all those characters, we got some great performances beyond Bryant and Undercuffler. Felissa Rose delivers exactly what you want when you see her name on the tin, and I think the same could be said of Lynn Lowry; Scott Alan Ward is great as the creepy, silent type; and Natalia Santacoloma has a small part, but came off really strong, especially for someone her age. Beyond all that, the locations add a lot of atmosphere, and the practical effects all looked great, which was refreshing to see. This is just a fun horror movie, you can load it up on a Saturday night with your friends, and also support indie creatives at the same time, it's a win-win.

Out of the J. Horton films we've reviewed, of which this is now 5, I think Trap is still my favorite, but this is up there. It's one of those movies where a lot of things get thrown at you, but in a way that made me want to see what was coming next. That's not easy to pull off, because the audience can get lost or overwhelmed, but here it manages to keep the intrigue up and the confusion down--though a little confusion is good, I think. And then out of these five films, I think Monsters in the Woods had the most comedic bent, and while A Hard Place isn't a comedy per se, it injects a lot of off-beat, comedic elements, yet still keeps the tone of the film where it needs to be, and maintains the film's stakes even with the moments of levity. The best might be the educational films on human reproduction, that are like dystopian creepy but hilarious too. It's just really great stuff.

On our Invasion Force review we talked about the term "meta," and how popular a term that is with the kids. We get a little of that here, as we have a zombie movie within this movie, starring Bai Ling, Glenn Plummer, and Sadie Katz. It has that meta element, where it sets the vibe for what the actual movie is going to be about--and speaking of being confused, early on I wasn't sure at points if I was watching the movie or the movie within a movie, which I think is one of those times where a little confusion is good, it added to the overall feel of the movie for me--but it's also a creative way for a filmmaker like Horton who may have names like Bai Ling and Glenn Plummer for only a day, to have them in the film throughout, but they don't have any impact on the story itself, allowing him to make changes as they shoot the rest of the film without worrying about whether or not he can get them back for reshoots. We've actually seen this done before, with Welcome to Willits and Dolph playing a cop on a police procedural that Bill Sage is watching while the drugs are turning on him. It just adds another layer to the film, and is more fun than the usual one-scene cameos with names like these. Before we end this paragraph, I need to mention Sadie Katz, whom we saw in Nipples and Palm Trees back in March of 2013. That was another indie screener, and she turned in a fantastic performance in that film, so it's great to see her back on the site all these years later, mixing it up with Bai Ling and Glenn Plummer.

As I said above, one area that this didn't work for me was the number of characters we had, and how those characters caused us to lose Rachel Amanda Bryant and Ashley Undercuffler's characters for portions of the film, as they were the two most compelling for me. The end of the film teases that there might have been more of a connection between them, but it wasn't fleshed out enough for me, so when that tease happens it made me feel like we missed out. I don't know what I would've cut out though to make their scenes more substantial, I think it's just one of those realities when you have a big cast, people will connect with some characters more than others.

Finally, anytime I think of the title of this film, A Hard Place, the Rolling Stones' "Rock and a Hard Place" gets stuck in my head. I remember it was off the Steel Wheels album, which I bought the tape of back in 1989 as a ten-year-old. I played the video on YouTube before I wrote this paragraph, and realized I probably hadn't heard the song since 1989, but also had heard it so much back then, that I still knew all the words, and remembered the video playing on MTV. Also, Mick Jagger was 46 when that album came out, guess how old I am as I'm writing this. And yet all these years later, and however many songs I've heard in between then and now, when I see "A Hard Place" written somewhere, or I think of the title of this film, that's the song that comes into my head--and I still mishear "put on a clown face" when Jagger sings "put on a kind face." Don't ask me what I thought Jagger would've meant by "put on a clown face," I was ten, it made sense then.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently rent A Hard Place on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime. This is worth your rental money, and you get to support indie creatives, so you get to enjoy a fun movie and do a good deed. Does it get much better than that? And thank you to Jason Horton for sending the screener for our review, I really enjoyed this.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10555668

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Steel Frontier (1995)

This is one I discussed on episode 3 of Jon Cross's PM Entertainment Podcast, which was a really fun conversation, and now we're finally giving it a review here. In addition to us and the PM Podcast, Chad Cruise at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Outlaw Vern, Tom Jolliffe at Flickering Myth, and Mitch at the Video Vacuum have covered this as well.

Steel Frontier takes place six years ago, after the apocalypse, where the world is a big Mad Max-ish mess, and a horrible conqueror (Brion James) has gathered up a bunch of baddies and taken over all the peaceful tire farming towns in the LA County area. Is there any hope? Sure, as is often the case, a heroic lone drifter comes into town (Joe Lara). He starts off by joining the gang, and then does a bit of a Yojimbo move to get Brion James's gang to kill each other. Will he eventually succeed? And in true PM fashion, will he require a lot of explosions and car chases to do so?

This one jumped to number 9 on my all-time PM list (which you can find on the DTVC Letterboxd), that's how much I enjoyed it, and Jon felt the same way. This is PM doing the Italian late-80s Mad Max exploitation flick, but doing it in true PM style. The exploitation comes in the form of violence, with explosions and car chases, which is nice because we don't get the usual sexual assault or other sexual exploitation the Italian films liked to do. We get some great Joe Lara as the lead, Brion James is a fantastic baddie, and the addition of Bo Svenson as James's second-in-command was solid too. From there you get all the beautiful PM action goodness you expect when you see the PM logo on the spine of your VHS, including this massive chimney explosion that the IMDb trivia says is the largest PM ever pulled off--and that's saying a lot considering this is PM we're talking about! PM gets it right again, and we're all better for it.

Out of all the Joe Lara films I've seen--which isn't that many, he's only at 8 now on the site--this is my favorite. He's everything you want in the roguish, Western hero, and we can't wait to see him enter this town and take out James and all his baddies. Another place where this movie deviated from the late 80s Italian films is they didn't do the whole "hero captured and tortured by the baddies, then he recovers and gets his revenge" penultimate act, which was refreshing for me. While I liked Hologram Man better as a film overall, this is the better Lara film for sure, and it's too bad he didn't get more roles like this. By my count, we have 7 or 8 more of his films that we could review, and I don't know how many of those we'll actually cover because they look hard to track down, so he may top out at around 12 movies, and I think that's okay considering how good a job he does here.

PM is closing in on the 50 Club at the DTVC, we're only one away now, and this is one I probably could've used for that milestone, but I didn't want to wait on it too long after the PM podcast episode was released. That's okay, I think there are some great candidates for the big 5-0, there's no shortage of fantastic PM flicks. What makes this one so good, is it's their take on this post-apocalyptic/Mad Max subgenre, and they successfully make it the PM version, they never get away from what they were best at. In the PM Podcast episode, Jon interviews both Paul Volk and Jacobson Hart, and they give great insights on what made this work. Hart in particular talked about how PM didn't do sexual exploitation, that their "exploitation cinema" was the action, and they nail it, especially with two great chase scenes, and that aforementioned chimney explosion. When you see PM on the spine, or listed under company credits if you look a movie up after seeing the thumbnail on a streaming site, you expect a certain level of fun, low-budget action, and this one delivers on that in a way that exceeded even those expectations.

Part of why this works so well is the stunt team PM puts together. The stunt coordinator/second-unit director is Michael J. Sarna, who has done a bunch of other PM flicks--including my personal number two all-time from them, The Sweeper, where he was stunt coordinator under Spiro Razatos as action director--plus the David Bradley classic Hard Justice, and a personal video store mainstay of mine, The Perfect Tenant--which I can't believe I haven't covered yet! In addition to him, we have 50 Club member Art Camacho, and soon to be inducted 50 Club Member Cole S. McKay, plus "Broadway" Joe Murphy sans his stunt coordinating partner Red Horton. And as if all those names weren't enough, we have stunt legend Kane Hodder as one of Brion James's gang, though not credited as doing any stunt work. Guess with all the PM names they had they were able to let him take a break on this one! This is part of the PM magic, let these great stunt names do their thing, and the result is this high-octane alchemy that was the secret to their success.

Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Brian Huckeba's "Chicken Boy" role. As Jon pointed out, this was a kind of character that showed up in Ozploitation films that this movie is in the tradition of, and Huckeba goes all in on his performance. It just makes things that much more fun and memorable, and with low-budget filmmaking every little bit helps. When the guys at Comeuppance reviewed this, Huckeba commented on it, and if you listen to the PM Podcast episode, Jon interviews him in addition to Paul Volk and Jacobson Hart, and he gives Jon some great jewels when recalling his experience on set. It would be easy for Huckeba to look at this part as a one-off in his career, maybe something he shows his family 30 years later so they can all have some laughs, but the fact that he's still this enthusiastic about this part today is great to see. It's more fun for us to embrace it if the people involved are embracing it too.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi, Prime, the Roku Channel, and Fawesome here in the States. That's a great way to catch this, but also if you see it in the wild on VHS, pick it up. And if you haven't yet, subscribe and listen to the PM Entertainment Podcast on your favorite podcatcher. Jon is delivering the PM podcast we've wanted for years, you need to check it out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114537/

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

211 (2018)

This was originally covered on episode 192 of the podcast, "Nepo Babies," which we did with Will from Exploding Helicopter, and I figured it was time to get it up on the site, especially since we want to get more Cage on here. In addition to us, Mitch from the Video Vacuum has covered this as well.

211 is a collision course to wackiness type affair, where a gang of mercenaries who want money that's being held in a bank in a small Boston suburb--err Sophia backlot--happen to rob it at the same time that two local police officers, Nicolas Cage and his son-in-law Dwayne Cameron, are in the area with their teenage ride-along, Michael Rainey Jr., who is stuck doing this ride-along because he committed the offense of "going to a rich private school while black." All hell breaks loose, and it doesn't get any better when we have a secondary thread following an Interpol agent played by Adrian Mutu's ex-wife, Alexandra Dinu. Can Cage save the day, and the movie?

He was able to save the day at least, and as Meatloaf once said "one out of two ain't bad." This movie hits all the spots of bad 2010s DTV featuring a big, one-time Hollywood star. Convoluted plot? Check. Eastern European location doubling for a US town? Check. The one-time Hollywood star playing a grizzled something or other? Check. The daughter of said one-time Hollywood's star's character played by a thin young woman with long hair, who wears jeans and flannel shirts, and has a difficult relationship with said one-time Hollywood's star's character? Check. Younger son-like character along for the ride? Check. Baddies who look like they were pulled from a Vegas night club on the weekend of a UFC event? Check. After we tick off all of those boxes, what are we left with? One moment where Cage goes off, and one fun moment where his actual son, Weston Cage, who's one of the baddies, has his dad in his sniper scope, but unfortunately they don't do more with it. The only realistic element of the movie is the fact that a young black male would be caught up in the system in a predominantly white Massachusetts suburb because he was trying to defend himself from white bullies in his school, and that the police officers he's doing the ride-along with wouldn't bother to ask about it and just treat him like a felon--and to that point, the moment where Cage does ask Rainey Jr. what happened was probably less realistic, I can't see real police officers caring either way. The other thing is, there are a lot of threads that never go anywhere. We meet the bank manager (Millennium mainstay Velizar Binev), and find out it's his anniversary. Very touching, only he gets a bullet to the dome by one of the baddies, and that's it. Why are we meeting him then? And while it's fun to reminisce about early 2000s European football, why is Alexandra Dinu's character in this, except as an Adrian Mutu conversation starter--and I must confess, I didn't know she was his ex-wife, Will told us on the podcast, but it opens up all kinds of doors for conversation, all of them more interesting than this movie. So maybe that's the best bet here, watch this with some friends who like DTV movies and European football, and let the tangents fly once Dinu appears on-screen.

This is now seven Cage films on the site, which doesn't seem like a lot considering how much he has out there for DTV stuff. The reason for this is he doesn't really get into the DTV world in earnest until about 2014, and that was about when I started my unplanned hiatus. If you look in the archives, in 2013 I had 96 reviews, and then in 2014 it's all the way down to 9, and in 2015 7, and then nothing until I came back in 2019. In 2014 he starts pumping these things out, doing like 2 or 3 a year, and this film here is right in the middle of that. By my count, there are over 30 DTV movies of his we haven't done yet, which would make him an automatic Hall of Famer if we did them all. It's an intriguing thought, and had I not gone on that unplanned hiatus, he'd probably already be in, because I would've been reviewing films like this that whole time. The other interesting thing I noticed, when you look at review counts on IMDb, they've been going down over time for most DTV flicks. For example, Bruce Willis had Acts of Violence come out the same year, and it had 38 critic review, compared to this film's 46. Then fast forward to 2023, where Willis's last film, Assassin, only had 23 critic reviews, while two films for Cage that year, Butcher's Crossing and The Old Way, had 55 and 63 critic reviews respectively, and some of his newer ones have even more. The Cage appeal and fascination never quite dimmed like it did for Willis and others like him--take 2022's Savage Salvation, which only has 19 critic reviews, despite having Robert De Niro in it--and now that we're seeing a Cage resurgence, it'll be interesting to see how many more of these DTV flicks he does, or if this will be a career capsule of 10 years and 30+ films, of which we had some real stinkers like this one, and some real gems like Pig.

As I mentioned above, the theme of the podcast episode I did with Will was "Nepo Babies," and the one in question here was Weston Cage, though Nicolas Cage is a nepo baby himself, being Francis Ford Coppola's nephew. (The other film we did was Dangerous, with Clint Eastwood's son Scott, a film I'm not sure if we'll review on here.) I think part of the draw for Nicolas Cage with this movie was that he could work with his son, even if they don't have any scenes together, and I can't fault him with that. And to Weston's credit, he does well enough as one of the baddies--though I think the scene of him smoking should've been cut, he didn't look natural smoking at all. Why not have him eat a sandwich instead? It's interesting that I'm writing this as the world has chosen a new pope--and you may think that as an American I'm excited by the first American pope, but he was part of the priest abuse cover-up, and I feel like we all missed out on not having a pope named Pizzaballa, which is a sign to me that the Catholic church is still behind the times--but anyway, the term "nepotism" came from the practice of popes in medieval Italy promoting their nephews--and "nephews," aka kids they fathered when they were supposed to be celibate--to high positions, so they could then be popes themselves. We see it in a lot of society, but in the acting world it's more glaring I think. I mean, would Weston Cage be in this film if he wasn't his father's son? And while Nicolas Cage has proven to be one of his generation's best actors, even if he changed his name so it wouldn't look like he was riding his famous uncle's coattails, none of it hurt, and probably at least greased the skids a bit so he could meet and network with the right people. On top of that, Will brought up the fact that as a nepo baby, these young actors have a safety net other people breaking into the business don't have the luxury of. They're not waiting tables or taking parts in ads for IBS meds to get work. If you factor that element in with the unforgiving economy we have, we'll probably see more nepo babies as the years go on, and they may take over the industry, the way upper-middle class children have taken over journalism in the US, because they're the only ones whose parents could support them through the unpaid internships that are part of the early stages of a journalist's career.

We have a new tag, and a new almost 40 Club member! Dian Hristov is the stunt coordinator, and I recognized his name as a Seagal stunt double in Belly of the Beast, so I thought I'd dig into his IMDb bio. Turns out he's done stunt work on almost 40 films we've reviewed here on the site! This is in large part due to the fact that he works with Millennium Films, and we've reviewed tons of their movies. And it's not just Seagal films. A lot of Dolph and a lot of Van Damme too, plus Isaac Florentine--who also produced this film, which is why he's tagged here. When you look at our October line up, we have a packed Hall of Fame class already, and while with him almost in the 40 Club, we can't not include him, we're already inducting Cole S. McKay, so he may have to wait until 2026. This begs another question: why isn't Millennial Films in the Hall of Fame? They have over 60 tags, plus a bunch more that I haven't tagged because I stopped keeping track. The short answer is, I don't know, but at least we'll get Hristov in eventually. Unlike Camacho, McKay, and Razatos, who worked in the 80s and 90s, and made the 90s the greatest DTV decade ever, Hristov is part of the DTV world's shift in the 2000s, but he helped make that a fun decade, and seems to have done his darndest to make the 2010s a little better too, despite where the market was going at that time. Here's to you Mr. Hristov, you're one of the greats.

Finally, you know if I teased Adrian Mutu in the opening paragraph, I was going to dedicate our penultimate paragraph to him, so here we are. In the early 2000s when I first had my own apartment out of college, I added the Fox Soccer Channel to my cable package, which meant every weekend I could watch my Arsenal and however many other Premier League teams every weekend. That was when I was introduced to Mutu, who was playing with Chelsea in the early 2000s, though what I remember more wasn't him playing for Chelsea, but the Sky Sports simulcasts on Mondays on Fox Soccer, where they updated us on his various scandals. He then went to Juventus, was part of two scudetto winning clubs, and then had those titles subsequently revoked as part of the Calciopoli scandal. The thing was, Serie A wasn't broadcast on Fox Soccer until later in the 2000s, when he was with Fiorentina, which was when I remembered him more. It's a name I hadn't thought of in maybe 15 years, so to have a 2018 DTV movie I'm discussing on the podcast be the thing that brings him back up is fantastic--and the fact that it wasn't on an episode with Scott Murphy from All 90s Action, All the Time, where we're known for having tangents on European football--and in fact have discussed Mutu's countryman, Gheorghe Hagi on a couple of occasions--is even more astounding. And this wasn't a tangent Will and I were on either, he brought it up as a notable fact about the film, which is even crazier. You just never know where these DTV films will take you.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently this is on a variety of streamers here in the States, including Plex, Fawesome, and the Roku Channel, so if you're interested, you can check this out in one of those places. I don't know that it's worth it though. What is worth it is checking out the pod episode Will and I did on this, number 192 in the archives, titled "Nepo Babies."

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4976192

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Invasion Force (1990)

This is one we covered on the podcast, back in December on episode 191, with Chris "The Brain" Kacvinski from Bulletproof Action, and it was time to cover it on the site as well, especially considering we hadn't done any AIP in a while. In addition to us, Chris has covered this on Bulletproof, as have the guys at Comeuppance.

Invasion Force looks like it's going to be about David "Shark" Fralick kicking ass and taking names. Not so fast, cowboy, turns out this is just a movie that's being made, none of this is happening for real. As luck would have it though, Richard Lynch is in the vicinity training mercenaries for a plan to take over the local town, which would then lead to them taking over the whole country. As luck would have it for them, they have no idea a movie is being shot on the other side of the mountain, and when they happen upon the film's leading lady, Renee Cline, arguing with her boyfriend, who just happens to also be the film's producer, David Marriott (the Basher from Shotgun), they kill him, but she survives and escapes back to the set, where she tells the director (Walter Cox) and some of the crew what happened, and they decide to load up on all the live ammo they have, and use all their special effects know-how to take these baddies on. Will they survive?

This is another fun time from AIP. Maybe not at the level of a Deadly Prey--though I think this shows they were more self-aware than we may have though with that movie--it's still pretty solid, and has a lot to like. Lynch is exactly the scene-chewing lead baddie you want, and the fact that he plays this whole thing straight adds to its charm. Cline and Cox were also fun as the leads--love that as the name of a legal comedy about two lawyers that were married but now divorced, and have to keep the practice alive--or I guess just the name of a personal injury firm that you see billboards of on the highway, "Cline and Cox will fight for you!" Then there's all the little extras that add to the enjoyment, like the product placement, this time Anheuser-Busch, especially at the cast party with the massive Busch beer can that looked like something from MTV Spring Break; or that the Basher from Shotgun is in this, and gets a great death scene. The fact that something like this is available on Tubi is a great thing.

This is our 11th AIP film on the site, which lags well behind other studios, like PM, Cannon, Imperial, and even The Asylum. A big part of that is how a lot of these films weren't as available when I started the site, but also they don't have the number of names those other studios have had. Essentially, we're reviewing AIP movies because they're AIP movies. Yes, you get names like Richard Lynch or DTVC Hall of Famer David Carradine from time to time, but compared to the names those other studios can give us, many of which are Hall of Famers, AIP sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. Even with Hall of Fame recognition, this October we have Imperial going in, because when we tagged them we discovered they had over 30 movies, so AIP will have to wait another year, but hopefully in that time I'll do a better job of getting more of their films up, because they have so much great stuff.

Speaking of finally getting a tag, David "Shark" Fralick somehow hadn't been tagged to this point, so we took care of that, which makes this his 15th film on the site. I haven't done a count of which first names are represented the most, but you'd be surprised how many Davids we have, it's right up there with Michael and William/Bill/Billy--I mean this film also has director David Prior and producer David Winters tagged. Anyway, Fralick is one of those guys that we see in a lot of these, and while he may not be the guy you seek out--even though he is on the cover of this one--he's one that when you see his name in the cast, you feel like it's got a bit more weight to it. I'm sorry it's taken me this long to tag him, but if any film would be worthy of him getting the tag, it's this--even though his cover is a bit of a red herring, and his part is more in line with the size of the parts he usually gets.

That 15 for Fralick is one more than the film's main baddie, Richard Lynch, a name that's been up for Hall of Fame consideration almost since we started the site, and it seems like every year he gets pushed back. I don't see that changing this year unfortunately, as we have slots already taken for Cole S. McKay, the aforementioned Imperial Films, and Kathleen Kinmont. He's such a fantastic baddie, and this film reaffirms that--as if you needed any reaffirmation, but it's nice to see it anyway. He's almost exactly playing the part he played in Invasion USA, except he wasn't Russian in this. That could've made it even more fun, but he was plenty fun enough. Exactly the baddie you want, every time, and here is no different.

The word "meta" gets thrown around a lot. I looked into it, and technically the term has been around since the late 80s, but it wasn't until later that it became a popular term. For kids reading this that are used to using the term, this movie is definitely "meta" before anyone would've really referred to a movie as "meta." Can you still call it "meta" when it was made before people called things "meta?" It's like "Yacht Rock," music that we called "Soft Rock" or maybe "AM Gold," was called "Yacht Rock" by some Gen Xers, and the term took off among a bunch of kids who like to call things "meta." The thing is, language is always changing, and this is just part of that. For example, I saw the word "nonplused" in Nabokov's Pnin the other day, which means "surprised" or "perplexed," but here in the US there's been a "nonplussed" definition shift to meaning "couldn't care less," probably because people initially confused the meaning, and enough people perpetuated the confused meaning that it's now become the meaning. It's how language evolves, except in my novel Chad in Accounting I used it with it's official, intended meaning, and now people who only understand its meaning as the new, US definition-shifted one, would be confused, as they would if they read Pnin. What I'm trying to say is, no, in 1990 this movie wasn't "meta," but due to changes in language, it's "meta" now, whether we like it or not, because that's "literally" how language evolves. (Like what I did there?)

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Tubi here in the States. I think that's a great way to go, though if you see this on VHS at a good price somewhere, it would be a fun addition to your collection. And if you haven't yet, you can check out the podcast episode I did with Chris from Bulletproof, episode 191 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238314

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!