Motel Blue (1997)

This is one Jon Cross from the PM Entertainment Podcast and After Movie Diner and I covered on a Sam Firstenberg Erotic Thriller double feature in episode 225 of the podcast, back in August of 2025. Between the fact that Firstenberg is a Hall of Famer and needs more movies reviewed, and that this has a bunch of other names, I had to get it on here as well.

Motel Blue has Soleil Moon Frye as a Dept. of Defense investigator tasked with making sure people should still have high-level security clearances, which is something she does by breaking and entering into a lot of people's houses. Anyway, she's assigned Sean Young, but the investigation takes her into a seedy underworld of people answering coded personal ads in adult magazines for hook-ups. As a young lady, Moon Frye takes a shine to Young, but will this idolization help or hurt her in her job? And as she digs deeper into who Young is, is she going to like what she finds? And how do all these other names play into this?

This isn't horrible, but it does require some leaps of faith. At the end, loose ends are flying together everywhere, and by the time you get your safety goggles on, Soleil Moon Frye is driving a convertible down the highway with a dog in the back seat, and then the credits roll. We also have two interesting performances, with Moon Frye doing the classic "Erotic Thriller role to get me out of that child actor reputation," where she's playing it completely earnestly; and then Young, as opposed to elevating the material, feels like she's exposing it to us in the way she's playing it, like a Michael Caine or Malcolm McDowell slumming it in one of these DTV Erotic Thrillers, which is fascinating to watch. Firstenberg for his part seems to be using Moon Frye as his muse, as we get a lot of close-ups on her, and as the star who needs this to get her out of that child actor mold, he can lean on her performance to get this thing over the goal line--and I'd say he'd have pulled it off if it wasn't for that crazy loose ends flying together finish, and a love scene where Moon Frye hooks up with this older psychiatrist character, which, with how young she looked and how old he looked, just didn't sit right. The other selling point was the names. We had Robert Vaughn as Moon Frye's boss; Tropical Heat aka Sweating Bullets's Rob Stewart as Moon Frye's colleague; Ski School's Spencer Rochfort as one of Young's hook-ups; and then Seymour Cassel and Lou Rawls as ministers. For a 90s Erotic Thriller with these names and Firstenberg at the helm, it's worth checking out, even with some shortcomings.

As always, we start with our film's Hall of Famer, Sam Firstenberg. We last saw him in Electric Boogaloo, the Cannon documentary, in 2024, and then as a director in 2021 with The Alternate when we inducted him into the Hall of Fame. He's now at 13 directed movies on the site, which ties him with Keoni Waxman for sixth-most all time, after Albert Pyun (40+), Fred Olen Ray (17), Joseph Merhi (15), Isaac Florentine (14/15 depending on how you count Max Havoc), and Jesse V. Johnson (14). The thing is, I don't see many more for him, so he may sit around 14 or 15, but that's okay, because he's given us so many classics, like American Ninja 2 and Riverbend. This may not be a classic of that level, but like some of those other directors I listed above, when Firstenberg takes on a movie like this, he gives it a level of polish that takes it beyond the usual DTV Erotic Thriller fare. His decision to make Moon Frye his muse I think also helped, as Young didn't appear to be doing him any favors. If you're a fan of his work, like I am, then this is worth adding to your watch list.

For people my age, Punky Brewster was on quite a bit, and I can think of some iconic moments from the show, like when Cherie locked herself in an abandoned old refrigerator in the backyard while playing hide and seek, or guest star Mark-Paul Gosselaar saying he was "crazy mad nuts about Margaux," or perhaps my favorite, when an El-less DeBarge performed for Punky, "you're a big boy, now..." I had lost her career after that, and had no idea that, before she was cast on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (which, as far as I can tell, never had an episode with Josie and the Pussycats guest starring, a missed opportunity), she had a brief spell in the DTV world. I don't know how much we'll explore those films, but it's something to consider, because she was good here. I don't think it achieved what she would've wanted, to get out of the child actor rut, but a few years later it didn't matter if she's getting cast on a network TV show. I was trying to think if that ever worked, making an Erotic Thriller to get yourself out of the child actor pigeon hole. Alyssa Milano maybe? And it was that double standard, that someone like a Monique Parent couldn't go make a network TV show if they started in Erotic Thrillers--making Motel Blue didn't preclude Soleil Moon Frye from getting on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Even with the double standard, it is fun to see former child actors like Moon Frye in one of these Erotic Thrillers.

Sean Young's case is different, and in the post-Me Too world we live in now, we can see how her career changed after she accused Warren Beatty of axing her from Dick Tracy after she refused his advances. Back then if you're a Sean Young and you accuse Beatty of something like that, you get labeled "difficult," and some of her other clashes with James Woods and Woody Allen sound about right for who those guys are, but at that time it was used to further cement her reputation as "difficult." What that means for us in the DTV world is she does more of these kinds of clunkers, and she knows she's doing them because she pissed off Warren Beatty, so she lets us know with every scene she's in, the way John Malkovich is mentally installing a new kitchen island with every line of substandard dialog in a modern DTV flick. To me, that kind of thing makes these movies more fun, and I appreciated that Young was bringing that kind of energy. She's another one who has more DTV stuff out there, so we'll see if we get to some of it.

Finally, during the episode Jon did a rendition of ELO's "Midnight Blue," replacing "midnight" with "motel." For me, it's Lou Gramm's "Midnight Blue" that I keep getting in my head once I see the title for this film. This is not to be confused with Icehouse's "Electric Blue," which is not only a different song, but sounds like it could be a Lou Gramm song too, making it all the more confusing. One thing I didn't realize until I played "Midnight Blue" and another Gramm solo song, "Just Between You and Me," is that they were on different solo albums, two years apart. I guess that makes sense that I wouldn't have known that, because I would've taped them off the radio, and if the DJ played "Midnight Blue" again because "Just Between You and Me" was a hit, all the better for me. Nowadays, post-Clinton's Telecommunications Act and the subsequent consolidation of radio stations, DJs can't just play older Lou Gramm songs on a whim, a program director who manages 150 stations is telling that DJ to shelve the Gramm and play Nickelback and Train twice an hour. It's a shame, as I listen to Gramm belt out "you're getting reckless, girl," and while it's nice that I can listen to them on YouTube, and only have to put up with the obnoxious "who's listening in 2026?" comment--seriously, what is the matter with you people who do that! We're all fucking here listening to the song! Do you need cheap heat engagement that badly? I guess so--but anyway, it's nice that a remnant from that time is me getting that song in my head whenever I see the title for this. Here's to you Mr. Gramm, you're one of the best to ever do it, there's no need to say you won't.

And with that, let's wrap this up. I honestly don't know how you can find this. It's expensive in the used VHS and DVD market. If you can find it cheap, give it a look, it's worth checking out. And for more discussion, check out episode 225 in the archives, "Cross Cross" and "Motel Blue."

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133981

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Diablo (2025)

This is one I planned to open the year with, but then decided I was going to open each month with a PM flick, so I pushed this one back a week, but the idea is it's my favorite action film of 2025, and I wanted to celebrate it as we start 2026. This is one we also covered on the podcast, episode 239 with Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, who has also covered this on the Bulletproof site; and I discussed it with Jon Cross on the After Movie Diner podcast, season 2 episode 22, where we also looked at A Working Man and Black Creek--and Jon's did a great write-up on it through the After Movie Diner Letterboxd account.

Diablo has Adkins as a mysterious figure who has snuck into Colombia to kidnap the teenage daughter (Alanna De La Rossa) of a major crime lord (Lucho Velasco). Despite how altruistic his motives might be, said crime lord puts out a bounty to get his daughter back. When one of the crime lord's henchman calls in Marko Zaror to get the girl back, all bets are off. Zaror's character is a psychopath with a metal hand and an immense amount of martial arts skills. Now he and Adkins are on a collision course to wackiness, and it's going to take everything they've got for either of them to prevail.

How many times do we see two names on the tin like Adkins and Zaror, and it delivers? And had this simply delivered it would've been great, and we'd have taken that and run. But this doesn't just deliver, these two guys give us multiple next-level fight scenes. It feels like for both of them, it's not about which of their characters gets to win, they see winning as delivering the best fight scenes together they possibly can, and as a result, we end up winning too. And as the As Seen on TV guys say, "we're not stopping there," because in addition to that, each star has their own number of fantastic solo scenes with stunt players who are all committed to making the best action movie they possibly can. This is what we as action fans are looking for, and what we often don't get anymore in the modern DTV space, but this is one of the few modern ones that I'd take the Pepsi Challenge with against the best of the Golden Age between the mid-80s and mid-90s, I thought it was that good.

We'll start as we usually do with our film's Hall of Famer, in this case Scott Adkins. This is his 33rd film we've reviewed, and I'd say after Avengement this is his second best (I liked The Expendables 2 better than this as well, but as an Adkins film I'd put this above it). I was going through movies of the 2000s to make a favorite DTV films of the 2000s list on Letterboxd, and it feels like a lot of them are Adkins films. Candidates like Ninja II, Savage Dog (which also has Zaror), Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Accident Man, the One Shots, it's ridiculous how much great stuff he's done over the past 25 years or so. To then say that this is the second-best among those gives you a sense of what I think of it. Adkins is going to be 50 this year, and I was trying to find someone who has a movie at this level at this age, and I can't think of it. Dolph was 52 when he did Command Performance, but that's not this. When you look at my top ten DTV stars of all time, I think I had him 11th, but with his record, I think he needs to go up to 8th, right behind Lamas at 7 and Dudikoff at 6, but depending on how this year goes, both of those two could be in his sights. (After that it's Daniels at 5, and Rothrock and Wilson tied for 3, so he has some work to do to crack the top 5.)

The other big performance is Marko Zaror, someone we've only seen a few other times on here, but anyone who's seen him in John Wick IV knows exactly who he is. And the thing is, while he plays a lot of baddies, here it's another level, absolutely chilling, think Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men with next-level martial arts skills. He would've gotten the first paragraph after the synopsis, except Adkins is the Hall of Famer, and his performance was great too, but looking at what Zaror has out there to watch, I imagine we'll be doing some movies of his soon where he does get that kind of spotlight. Again, we know what he brings to the table, so it's not like we didn't think he or Adkins were capable of what they give us here, but to see it happen is another thing. One of my 2026 New Year's resolutions for the site should be to get more Zaror on here, so we'll see if I can keep to that.

There's a short list of DTV action directors who are getting after it right now. Florentine, Johnson, and I think we can add James Nunn too. Now we have another name, Ernesto Díaz Espinoza. Like Florentine, Johnson, and Nunn, who have done some great stuff with Adkins, Espinoza and Zaror have some other films out there that I need to check out. There was also a massive local stunt team that all did a great job on this who should be applauded as well. I've spent a lot of time talking about the fight scenes between Adkins and Zaror because they were so amazing, but the two of them each had some scenes on their own with the stunt workers that were all fantastic too. Especially the bar/restaurant scene, where Zaror's character was taking on one after another. My heart will always be for the Blind Beggar's Bar scene in American Ninja 2, but the one here is one of the best we've seen in a long time, DTV or otherwise, and that stunt team played a huge part in that.

Finally, this is something I mentioned on the podcast episode too, but during that fantastic final fight between Adkins and Zaror, right as a punch was about to be thrown (or if you're a Real Housewife of New Jersey, "being flown"), Amazon cut to a commercial. We don't pay for the ad free version of Prime, so I guess that puts us at their mercy, but I feel like they could find better places to insert their ads. When we were growing up, there were TV edits of movies that made sure breaks were in natural spots in the film, often when reels were being changed, but now we no longer have reels, and streamers like Amazon have so many movies to deal with that they just put the ads on certain time stamps and call it good. This movie also isn't available on DVD, otherwise I'd agree that that's a better bet, especially if my local library had a copy; and to be fair, as far as streamers go, Prime is on the better side when it comes to ads, it's just this one was particularly galling. My hunch is this is only going to get worse, and I guess if we want to watch movies like Diablo that aren't on physical media, we'll have to live with it--or as Johnny Rzeznik said, "live around it."

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently Amazon Prime is the only option, whether that's as part of your Prime membership, or I guess you could pay $4.99 to rent it without ads. I don't know if you need to go that far, but for me this is one of the best action movies of the last 25 years, so if you haven't seen it yet, check it out. And for the podcast episode I did with Chris the Brain, that's episode 239 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27757546

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

To Be the Best (1993)

In 2026 I've decided to start something that I started last month without realizing I was starting it, and that's reviewing one PM for the first post of every month. That means we'll have at least 12 PM flicks reviewed this year. Not a bad deal, and I figured for our first one I'd do one I'd been meaning to do forever, which also has an exploding helicopter, so I can tick that off the list too. In addition to us, the PM Podcast covered this, plus Toyman at Bulletproof, and Karl Brezdin at First of the B-List.

To Be the Best is about a kickboxing/martial arts tournament, where the US team is one of many entrants, and their biggest competitor is the Thai team, composed of residents from the Bangkok Chinatown. The coach of the US team is former disgraced fighter Rick Kulhane (Martin Kove) and his two sons Sam (Phillip Troy Linger--and no, he didn't have to let it) and Eric (Michael Worth), who is the team's best fighter. The problem is the evil Alex Cord is hanging around, and he has $500,000 on the Thai team's best fighter Hong Do (Steven Vincent Leigh), and to make sure his bet comes in, he's threatening Eric's girlfriend (Brittney Powell). Will Eric throw the big fight?

This does exactly what you want PM to do, except the middle is a bit draggy, which we'll get to in a second. It starts with some underground fighting, where a man who's a cross between a poor man's Nick Vallelonga and a poor man's Johnny Roast Beef tries to get Worth to throw the fight, and when he doesn't, to show Worth he means business, he has his helicopter pilot take Worth for a ride, hanging him from a cord while he flies him around Vegas. The pilot gets a little too into it though, and crashes into one of the hotels, causing Worth to go flying into one of the suites. It's as amazing as it gets, only to be followed up in the next scene by another underground fight in LA that gets broken up by the police, leading to a two-pronged chase with one set of cops chasing some guys in a white car, and another chasing Linger (which he didn't have to let it) on a dirt bike. The problem was, the movie couldn't keep that kind of energy up, and things bog down a bit with some sparring montages, broken up by a nice bowling alley fight, and then it's just a tournament film, until the end, which is another fantastic group of great action set pieces to finish things off. I think where that leaves us, is this is a great time, and while it's maybe only a top 30 PM flick for me, that's still going to be a fun way to spend your 90 minutes.

We're now at 54 PM films, and this is one of those ones where you'd think it would've been done sooner, but for some reason it kept getting pushed back, and I think the only reason I bumped it up to now is the fact that it has an exploding helicopter, so I can chip away at my paltry number on Exploding Helicopter's Letterboxd list. And what a thing of beauty that helicopter explosion is, and while the movie isn't able to maintain that energy throughout, the fact that had it at all is why we come to PM films. This is also number 58 for Art Camacho, who's not only fight coordinator, but he plays one of the US team as a character named "Runt"--which at no point is that expounded upon, that's just the name they gave him. Definitely in 2026 he'll be our fourth member of the 60 Club. We're also seeing Martin Kove again for the first time since VFW in 2024. He's at 19 now, so we'll see if we get him past 20 this year. And then for our stunt coordinators, this film features the duo of Red Horton and "Broadway" Joe Murphy, with the former as second-unit director, and the latter stunt coordinator. They're at 17 and 16 films respectively, which I think are numbers we'll see get bigger as we do more PM flicks.

Two names that are finally getting tags are Michael Worth and Vince Murdocco. Neither have big numbers--five for Worth, 11 for Murdocco--but they both were such a big part of 90s DTV action, especially these PM flicks, that the tagging was overdue--especially if Ian Jacklin's been tagged, because they inhabit a similar space, though to Jacklin's credit, he has more tags than either of them with 13. Worth is the star in this one, and I think there's a sense that maybe PM was positioning him to do more stuff like this, but this ended up being his last film with them, I think due to him making Fists of Iron, which I believe no one that worked on that other than Art Camacho did another film for PM--Matthias Hues hadn't worked with them before, and Richard Munchkin only did some LA Heat and Hollywood Safari episodes. Murdocco is something else. Just saying "it also has Murdocco" evokes a sense of a certain kind of low-budget 90s actioner, and while that movie is often also a PM film, after 1994's Magic Kid II, he doesn't do any other films for them either, but he also wasn't a part of Fists of Iron, so I don't know if it was due to any kind of issues with PM. They may just not have had a place for him as they moved into different movies and got bigger names. I guess I get it, but how could you not have a place for Murdocco?

What the hell is going on in that image below? Are we looking at a potential 10.0 Mulletude mullet? Sure, the business on top is a little more manager at a hardware store business than you'd want, but the party in the back is almost Sunset Strip hair band rager--probably more like backstage afterparty at a Midwestern tour stop for a hair band, and maybe not the headliner like Poison, but an opening band like Trixter or Hurricane--but I'm quibbling on something that at least has to be a 9.8 on the Mulletude scale, and spending way too much time explaining why I'm deducting two tenths of a point, instead of basking the beauty that is that fantastic ape drape. And the thing is, it comes at a time when I'm not sure what's happening with this movie because it's mired in a bunch of fights and intrigue around Alex Cord being a dick, but then I finally get my shot of the Vegas Strip McDonald's so I can tag that, and then boom, I'm hit in the face that with Hall of Fame caliber mullet, and it's just all Tiger Woods on the 18th hole birdie fist pumps from there. I went back through our old posts, and saw that I gave the Barbarian Brothers a 9.8 for their mullets in Double Trouble, and I guess that's because they're more workman-like and added to the overall Barbarian Brothers charm, but that means I either need to go back and drop that rating, or bring this one up a tad. 9.9 sounds too high for this mullet, even as amazing as it is, so maybe the Barbarians need to go down to 9.5 or so.

Finally, one of the elements running through the film is Martin Kove's character's love of the LA Raiders. I'm sure it was just tossed in, but based on his character's age and when the team moved from Oakland, it wouldn't make a lot of sense that he'd root for them, unless there was some kind of quirk in his character or special unique reason for it, neither of which was mentioned. Being born in the late 40s, if he's from LA he'd have grown up with the LA Rams as his team, because the Oakland Raiders didn't move to LA until 1980, when he would've been in his 30s. To give you a history of NFL football in LA would give you a popsicle headache, but if you're not familiar with the league, you could look the NFL up on Wikipedia and find there are no Raiders in LA, the two LA teams are the Rams and the Chargers, but there is a Las Vegas Raiders. Two years after this film was released, the Raiders went back to Oakland, one year after the Rams moved to St. Louis, leaving the second largest city in the US without an NFL team, until the Rams moved back to LA in 2016, and the San Diego Chargers moved to LA one year later; and then in 2020 the Raiders moved from Oakland to Las Vegas. (I'm sorry, I said I wasn't going to get into it, and I did anyway, so hopefully the popsicle headache wasn't too horrible.) My point is, Kove's character should've been a Rams fan, but it's kind of more PM-ish that he rooted for the Raiders instead.

And with that, let's wrap this up. The Roku Channel has this, but when I watched it the audio wasn't synched, so I watched it on YouTube instead, which was fine. However you watch it, it's a solid addition to your PM experience, and one you should definitely check out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108346

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

ApoKalypse (2025)

This was an indie screener request from the film's creator, Lutz Geiger, one I had intended to do back in August, so I feel horrible that I'm only getting to it now. Maybe that should be a New Year's resolution, stay caught up on indie screeners. Let's see if I can keep to it!

ApoKalypse is an animated feature that follows Apo (Chris Koehne), a young man trying to get his skateboarding accessory company off the ground with his friend Jamal (Raven Wong), while the two work at a burger joint in the mall called Buns of Steel. The problem is, it's the early 2020s, and while the COVID vaccine is available, a cadre of unserious Americans don't want to take it. That's where the mall's director, Mr. Degeneres (Andrew Helbig), finds a way to get more people to his dying mall: he pretends to be a health influencer who pushes rat poison as a cure for COVID, which causes all these unserious Americans to come to buy it. Unfortunately, one side effect is it turns the people who take it into zombies. Now Apo, Jamal, and Apo's friend Cho (Ao Mikazuri) from the Korean chicken spot in the mall, need to find a way to escape. Will they get out alive?

This movie gets a lot of stuff right, which is great, because we live in unserious times, especially here in the US, so watching something like this acts as a form of catharsis. Beyond the depiction of Karens and other MAGA types and how ridiculous they are, I also liked the depiction of Apo trying to find a way to make money in an economy that's increasingly more difficult for people his age. The other thing I appreciated was the animation softened the grossness of a lot of the stuff that happens, like when a pregnant zombie Karen kicks her baby out, and said baby is swung around by the umbilical cord to attack a fleeing patron, or when we get to the end and the mall is a pile of dead bodies, rotting zombies, and feces, it's a lot easier to take when it's all a series of drawings. There are some moments, especially early on, where scenes take a little longer than I'd have liked to develop, but the entire film clocks in at just over an hour, so none of it hurts too much. Especially after the year we just had, this might help you feel a little better, so it's worth checking out.

The concept of the Karen has grown in the age of social media and viral videos, to the point that content creators have turned to hiring actors to portray Karens in staged scenarios. What I liked here was Geiger was able to bring the concept of the Karen back to the racist elements that it was born from. It wasn't just about entitled upper- and middle-class white women asking to speak to the manager, it's about these specific women using the levers of society at their disposal to harm black and brown people, and that's what we see here, whether it's the Karen on the street trying to get Apo arrested for riding his skateboard, to the one at the burger joint trying to get Jamal fired for not giving her a free water. I think if you hear "zombie Karens" in 2025, you might think of the staged, viral version of that we see today, but that's not what we have in this movie, which I appreciated, and I think helped make this work.

Another area where the zombie metaphor worked for me is in this discussion around what people should do if they have these unserious, uncouth MAGA family members in their lives. It's fortunately not a discussion I've personally had to deal with, but when a close family member would rather eat horse paste than get a vaccine shot, or believes all of the ills of our society come from undocumented immigrants, trans people, and honestly teaching America's racist history in schools, there are no easy answers on how someone should approach that. Older generations have this idea that family relations are important no matter what, and everyone needs to agree to disagree; while younger generations are quicker to go no-contact and spend holidays with friends or alone instead of enduring uncomfortable family situations. That's where the zombie metaphor is best, because sometimes you just gotta get out and save yourself; but then later when Cho's parents are stranded in the mall, Cho convinces Apo to help her save them, because they're not racist zombies, they just give Cho a hard time. It's like, if they're full on zombified, you gotta get out of there; but if they're just a pain in the ass and don't have any abhorrent views, you can't just abandon them to the zombie apocalypse.

You may have noticed that Uwe Boll is tagged in this. He did the voice of the sleeping police officer in the mall, who sleeps through the entire mess, then wakes up and finds a finger in one of his donuts, which he proceeds to remove, lick the chocolate off of, and then toss aside. We haven't seen Boll on the site in almost 11 years, when we reviewed the third In the Name of the King movie. At that time we were close to our unplanned hiatus, we only had two more reviews after that until I came back in 2019, and Boll himself went on a hiatus himself in 2016. He was someone on track to be another Hall of Fame director, and looking at his bio, he has another 7 or 8 movies we could review, which would put him at 15 directed movies, more than enough to get him in. It might be something we look at going into the new year, especially since we're almost finished with Isaac Florentine's filmography, so we'll have open slots for other director posts.

Finally, one area that this film didn't get into as much, is the male equivalent to the Karen, the doughy guy in Ray-Bans with a late 90s goatee that probably wasn't in style when he had it back then, let alone 25 years later. Geiger opts for more militant types, thinner guys with shaved heads, which works, but I always think of that collage of profile pics where all those MAGA guys looked the same. And it is an interesting double standard, because while we have staged viral videos of actors pretending to be Karens, we don't have the same thing with actors playing those types of guys, even though here in South Philly I think you're more likely to see those guys than you are Karens. I'm not an actor, but being a bit on the doughy side myself, and being in my late 40s now, it is interesting to consider if a content creator in this area came to me to play the part of a MAGA guy in a staged confrontation with restaurant workers. I guess first off, if my day job found out they may not take it well, even if it was staged, but that aside, could I do it, especially if the money was good? First I'd need the goatee, which, when it was popular in the late 90s my facial hair hadn't matured enough for me to be able to do the mustache portion, let alone the connector to the goatee, so I've never had that look before. Add on the Ray-Bans for someone who never wears sunglasses, and I think I might scare myself, even before I put on the "These Colors Don't Run" shirt. I don't know what content creators pay for that kind of work--or if they provide their own Ray-Bans and "These Colors Don't Run" shirts, because I can't afford my own Ray-Bans, and without a car it's hard to get to the Shore to buy one of those ridiculous shirts--but if the number was good, maybe something in the four figures range, I could use that money to do some trips to see some ballparks I haven't been to before--again, assuming my day job never found out. I can see the Zoom call now, "hey Matt, what's with the goatee?" "Oh, you know... just trying something new out... you like it?" "Um... as long as you like it, Matt, that's what's important."

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently rent this for $2 on Prime. It's a fun way to support an indie creative, plus I think it's cathartic as well considering the year we just experienced. Lutz Geiger and company do a great job handling these issues, and the animated aspect makes the gross parts easier to manage, so it all worked for me.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27166284

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

We Kill for Love (2023)

It's the weekend after Christmas, and continuing a tradition I've done since I've come back from hiatus in 2019, we're doing another documentary, this time one that Jon Cross from the PM Entertainment Podcast and the After Movie Diner recommended to us. He and I have been doing a series of Erotic Thrillers on the podcast for the past year or so too, so you can check those out as well over in our podcast archives.

We Kill for Love is a documentary that looks at the rise, reign, and fall of the Erotic Thriller during the 80s and 90s. It examines the mix of genres and inspirations that the films draw from, and the unique cultural environment that gave them birth. We also get some great interviews from people like Fred Olen Ray, Monique Parent, and Andrew Stevens. As time goes on though, the forces that gave us this unique cinematic moment serve to be its undoing, and as the 90s become the 2000s, the market starts to dry up. As our documentarians sift through the VHS detritus of what once was, they and their subjects try to make sense of it all. But is there a sense of it all to make? Does a femme fatale with a handgun in her stocking-top ever go out of style?

Overall I enjoyed this, but it does clock in at two hours and 45 minutes, so you're in for long ride. I'm okay with that though. Yes, it's long for a documentary, but too short for a mini-series, so probably from a streaming algorithm standpoint--and maybe a modern attention span standpoint too, it doesn't quite fit, but I almost feel like that makes it all the better, like the subject matter it's covering, it's not of this time either. The biggest thing is the director, Anthony Penta, pulls footage from so many of these movies, that you feel like you're in the 90s discovering them on cable all over again. And then the interviews are fantastic, with all the actors, directors, producers, and film scholars and film writers telling us how these were made, what they were about, and what kinds of messages were below the surface. As someone who was born in 1979, and grew up in the 90s, there wasn't a sense for me that there was a world before these films, they just always existed, but now 25-30 years later, to see the birth, growth, and unfortunately death and postmortem of something that had such a huge impact on my love of film, especially direct-to-video movies, was a lot of fun, and I think worth checking out--one of the few times I'll recommend something with such a long runtime!

When we started the site, I expected to do more Erotic Thrillers, and while the site moved more toward action movies because those films got the most engagement, that was in comparison to horror, comedy, and sci-fi. Erotic Thrillers on the other hand were the only genre that got the hits on the site that action did, the problem was, in the late 2000s, those movies were harder to find. A lot of them didn't make it to DVD, which was where I got most of the movies we reviewed in those early days; but many weren't even on home VHS release, they were only sold to video rental stores and cable movie outlets. Even on YouTube it was hard to get them, because the adult content would cause them to get taken down. It looks like some of them are making it to Tubi and other free streamers, but with those it's dicey because they can get taken down just as quick. So it's still an uphill battle, but there are ways to get these, so I'm going to do my best to get more of them up on the site, because as this film documents, they're a large part of the DTV legacy.

As I mentioned above, the interviews were great. One of my favorites was Monique Parent talking about how much she was working in the 90s, and how all the movies ran together for her. She gives us an unabashed slice of what that world was like in a way that puts you back there in it. From a Hall of Famer standpoint, we had Fred Olen Ray, who ran the gamut on movies he made in the 90s, but Erotic Thrillers were a big part of that. Between him and Jim Wynorski, they talked about why they needed to use aliases, because distributors were like "we already have enough of their movies!", and Wynorski joked that people on IMDb have found most of his films made under an alias, but there are still a few out there that people haven't found yet. Another big name that was interviewed was Andrew Stevens, and not only did he discuss the Night Eyes series, but also how he moved from actor to producer, and the part Night Eyes played in that. I've finally tagged him for all his producer credits on the site, and this makes film 33, so we'll be putting him in the Hall of Fame next October. Finally, speaking of tags, my rule for documentaries has been if someone was interviewed I'll tag them, but not if it's just footage of one of their films. I'm making an exception to that here for Julie Strain, who gets her own tribute segment in the middle of the movie, which was really nice to see. Here's to you Ms. Strain, you were one of the best to ever do it, you've truly been missed.

We've talked a lot both on the site and the podcast about Blockbuster's role in running the Mom and Pop video stores out of business, and then themselves dying off when Netflix came on the scene, because they had no brand loyalty. This movie gets into some other ways Blockbuster had a negative effect on the DTV industry as the 90s went into the 2000s, but also some other ways that their business model led to their own undoing. The first thing they mentioned was how in the early days of Blockbuster, DTV distributors loved them because they could negotiate big one-off deals of like 20,000 copies, as opposed to getting thousands of individual Mom and Pops to order the movie on their own out of a catalog. It meant in one purchase order from Blockbuster they could get their budget back and then some. The problem was, when the major studios got in on the home video market, both for DTV films and their major releases, the indie distributors got frozen out. This led to something though that I didn't consider. Part of the Mom and Pop business model was only having a couple copies of a new release, that way you'd rent something else if you came in and found the one you wanted wasn't there. With Blockbuster having dozens of a new release, it meant everyone got the movie they wanted, which meant they weren't renting as many movies overall as they did during the Mom and Pop era. The other thing was the cheap DVD market that comes in the early 2000s. Suddenly movies you could only get on VHS, or worse, by taping off cable, were now available for $5 in the bargain bin at Walmart; or those low-budget 10 movies for $10 sets, my friends and I would get one of those and watch three or four over a weekend, and got a better deal out of it than renting that many movies. All of these things led to the collapse of the video market, and took Erotic Thrillers down with them. They tried to pivot in the early 2000s to a more soft-core porn approach, but by the mid-2000s porn was so available for free on the internet that it no longer had any market either.

Finally, speaking of porn, this tackles the subject of exactly what is porn, what that means if an actor is working in porn, and do Erotic Thrillers count. I think the first thing is the double-standard between women working in front of the camera, versus directors working behind the camera. Fred Olen Ray can make two or three Erotic Thrillers a year in the 90s with all kinds of sex in them, and still be able to make Hallmark Christmas movies today, while an actor who took their top off in dozens of sexually charged thrillers may not be afforded that same luxury. And I think there's some of that under the surface when some of the actors who were interviewed insist "I never did porn" the way a guy in the 90s would've said "I'm not gay," as if there's anything wrong with either. I think for my age cohort though, which was 10-20 years younger than the actors in these films, we grew up with them, and as such, we might have been the first mini-generation to look at this stuff differently, and not immediately think someone working in the adult film industry should be shunned, let alone if someone got naked in an Erotic Thriller. From there you get younger Millennials and Gen Z who say you shouldn't judge a sex worker, full stop. In the 80s and 90s there was this Conservative brand of feminism that was anti sex work, which this movie labels as left wing politically, but younger Millennial or Gen Z feminism would say isn't feminism at all, and I think for them, hearing the actors in this trying to distance themselves from the porn industry would be off-putting. In that sense, I hope more of these movies become available on streamers so younger Millennials and Gen Z can consume them, because I think they're a missing part of the story of how we get to the sex positivity of the 2010s. Another thread in the film is this idea that you couldn't make these films today in the world of sex positivity, but I disagree. These movies have a lot of strong women with a lot of sexual agency, if anything they were ahead of their time, and could fit in nicely in the modern environment.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As you can see from my long post, this movie packs a lot in, and I've only scratched the surface of it. While it's free to stream on Tubi you should check it out. The Erotic Thriller was a moment in cinematic time, and if you lived it, the nostalgia factor alone is worth it; but if you're younger and curious about this, this is a great starting place.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10404002

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Special Forces (2003)

In my attempt to get a more respectable percentage on Will's Films that Have an Exploding Helicopter Letterboxd list, here is one from Isaac Florentine that we hadn't covered that also had an exploding helicopter, so we kill two bird with one stone--which sounds horrible, I'm not killing any birds. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Simon at Explosive Action, and Mitch at The Video Vacuum have all covered this, so this is a Superfecta movie and then some.

Special Forces has Marshall Teague as the head of a special forces group that's called into a former Soviet Republic to pick up a young woman (Daniella Deutscher) who got in over her head there and is being held prisoner. So he gets his team (which includes DTVC favorite Tim Abell and Nitro from American Gladiators), they get in, go through some issues, then wait for the chopper to get them out. With 30 minutes left in the movie, it ain't so easy though. Said helicopter is blown up, most of Teague's team is killed, and he's captured. Will he and his remaining crew make it out alive?

This was a tale of two movies. The first hour was a cinematic version of that urban legend chain letter email your uncle sent you after 9/11, you know, the one about a Muslim convenience store owner laughing at the 9/11 news reports while watching CNN in his store, and the Pepsi/Coke distributor seeing it and pulling all his beverages out, something of course that never happened, but the first hour of this movie felt like it was made in the spirit of that jingoistic, racist urban legend chain email--and I'm probably not going too far to say that uncle that sent the email signed up for Facebook ten years later and made your life hell, only to be felled by the Delta Variant ten years after that because he wasn't vaccinated--RIP that uncle. Anyway, in that spirit, this movie hits all the tropes, yet does manage to eke out a few nice moments, like Teague and Abell's chemistry, or Scott Adkins popping in and having a few fun fights; but ultimately it is that movie, from the moment it starts, instead of American cowboys and Italian actors playing bad Native American stereotypes, we have American special forces and Lithuanians playing bad Arab stereotypes--which I guess they thought was too on the nose, so they moved the proceedings after that to a fictitious former Soviet Republic to soften the racism a bit while keeping all the jingoism. At that hour mark, when they get the girl and wait for the helicopter to bring them home, I'm thinking "what the hell are they going to do for another thirty minutes?" And that's when it gets ridiculous. We have Nitro from American Gladiators (Danny Lee Clark) running at enemy soldiers with a pair of grenades to take them out as some kind of valiant last stand, and if you asked me how I'd want Nitro to exit a film like this, you couldn't do it any better. Then we have a fantastic fight scene between Adkins and the baddie's second-in-command (Vladislav Jacukevic), which is the next level kind of stuff we want from Adkins and Florentine. And then the topper, the beautiful way Teague dispatches the baddie, the best baddie killing this side of Richard Lynch in Invasion USA. So where does that leave us? An hour of mediocre jingoistic retread material we've seen myriad times before with a few inspired moments, then a half-hour of fantastic ridiculousness. At least it's free on Prime, but I think if you're an action fan, you need to see those last 30 minutes.

That was a massive "what do I think" paragraph, so we'll tighten it up a bit as we discuss our two Hall of Famers, Scott Adkins and Isaac Florentine. This was early on in Adkins's career, but you can see where he was headed. It's as electric as you want from him, which, in that first hour, is just punching it up from the usual fare; but when the film turns for that last half-hour, he's there to deliver in this new over the top (Stallone style) world. For fans of his work, I don't know that it hits the heights of his best stuff, but it's still stuff you've gotta see. As far as Florentine, this is now 14 directed films for him on the site (15 depending on how you count Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon), and while I don't know if I'd put this as a whole above any of those other ones I've seen (Assassin's Bullet has the great cast that I think edges this out), that last half-hour is as good as almost everything else he's done for my money. It looks like we have three more of his films, and then we'll have all of his DTV feature directed covered, so I imagine we'll get that done sometime next year, which'll be great to see.

We get the great Marshall Teague as a hero for a change, and as I mentioned above, I really liked the chemistry he and Tim Abell had, someone we're also used to playing more baddies. It was like buddy cop mixed with two career servicemen who have been through a lot together. I get too that as two former servicemen themselves, after 9/11 they'd have wanted to play characters like these as opposed to their usual baddies, but the thing I realized in watching them here, is it's their baddies that elevate the movies they're in to another level. Look at Teague in A Dangerous Place, something that should've just been PM Entertainment's Karate Kid, but Teague's baddie is so sinister it makes the movie more than that; and we've talked about Abell's killer in Instinct to Kill, one of the most chilling performances we've seen on the site. As much as I liked them here, they're showing us the old adage that anyone can be the hero, but to bring it as a baddie like they have is something else. The other thing is, when the movie turns at the hour mark, Abell's character is killed off, which was a shock, but when you get to Teague's end fight with the main baddie (Eli Danker), it couldn't be as ridiculous as it needed to be if Abell was there.

Fans of the site are probably used to seeing Malibu from American Gladiators on here, but this is our first time seeing Nitro, aka Danny Lee Clark. The role he's playing in this is almost like Ian Jacklin without the Ian Jacklin, if that makes sense. Like you like the idea of Ian Jacklin in this part, but you don't want all the Ian Jacklin that comes with casting him. For example, Nitro's beautiful death scene probably doesn't work as well if you have Ian Jacklin doing it, he would've given you too much Jacklin, and I don't think that scene needed more Jacklin, it needed to straddle that razor-thin line between full-on earnestness and parody of itself. I was looking up Clark's bio, and while he doesn't have much, he has this interesting vanity project called Looking for Bruce that co-starred Paige Rowland from PM's Christmas classic Riot, and the recently departed Gil Gerard. Unlike Nitro, who doesn't have a lot of credits, it looks like Gerard had more than a few DTV films, including one called Nuclear Hurricane that he did with his Buck Rogers co-star Erin Gray, and was directed by Fred Olen Ray. Here's to you Mr. Gerard, you were one of the great ones.

Finally, as I mentioned above, the second-in-command baddie looks like the lead singer of Incubus. We also had a member of Teague's team that looked like Bryan from the Backstreet Boys. I could spend this whole paragraph saying how crazy it is that all of that is 25 years ago now, and that it's like classic rock or something, and how old I think I am at 46--and to be fair, my back does a better job of telling me that than music from 2000 being 25 years old. I went back and watched some Incubus videos just to get a better sense of them before I wrote this paragraph, and found a video Rick Beato did from seven years ago breaking down why "Pardon Me" is a great song, and maybe he's right, but all I hear is the New Metal wall of sound guitar rifts, mixed with record scratching because adding a DJ to your band was a thing then. It's not that I don't like that song, but is it something that makes me want to fire up YouTube just to hear it? Or sing along when I hear "Drive" in the drug store. What we didn't realize we were seeing with the New Metal and the Boy Band stuff is the beginning of the end of music as we knew it. Throw in the I Have More Money Than You rap songs, which begat the auto-tuned I Have More Money Than You rap songs, and the death knell was there, like a toxic fungus destroying the banana crop, and the spread of this fungus was hastened by the consolidation of radio stations after the Telecommunications Act was passed under Clinton. Forget "Drive" being a drug store song, now we have bands who only make drug store songs. So while Adkins wins the battle against the figurative corporate music industry in this film, we ultimately lost the war.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this free on Prime and a few other streamers in the US. While that first hour is a bunch of well-worn stuff you've seen myriad times before, that last half-hour is the stuff that dreams are made of, so as a free streamer it's worth checking out. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324038

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

 

American Dragons aka Double Edge (1998)

We lost another great one last week, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, one of the consummate movie villains, especially in these DTV films that we love. We'd covered most of the films he'd done in a starring role, so I had to go to one where he's more of a supporting character for his in memoriam post, and I figured this one would do the trick. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, and Ty and Brett at Comeuppance have covered this as well.

American Dragons has Michael Biehn as a New York cop who gets demoted back to homicide after his undercover case goes bust on him. The murder he's now investigating involves some high-ranking Yakuza and an origami lotus flower left behind for evidence. That draws the attention of a Korean detective (Park Joong-hoon), who comes to New York to help Biehn--he also wants revenge on this lotus killer, because he killed Park's wife and son. As they investigate further, Biehn sees that this case dovetails with his previous one, and perhaps this lotus killer (Byron Mann) might be working with the mob enforcer he was trying to bring down (Don Stark).

Overall this was a fun one. Tight runtime, nice action sequences, especially the final one, and Biehn and Park were a fun combo. It does have its flaws though. Biehn was 42 when this came out, but his character dressed like 19-year-old me in 1998, with his oversized shirts, backwards scally cap, and Airwalk sneakers. What were they going for with that? Was he supposed to be the X Games Cop? From a tonal standpoint, a lot of it felt like this stylish cop thriller, drawing from similar movies from the late 80s that I loved, but then you'd get these goofy buddy cop moments that betrayed that tonality. Finally, for a tight runtime, the movie still had some instances of padding. We had opening credits padding, which I think took three minutes over a black background with nothing happening; buddy cops fighting padding, where our two heroes get on each other's nerves to the point that they have a drawn-out fight that was only there to add to the runtime; and then to cap it all off, we have gym training montage padding, out of nowhere near the end of the film. We also had these elements that I wasn't sure if they helped or hurt things, like Don Stark as an evil mafia enforcer. He's kind of a goofy caricature of the whole thing, which was maybe more intriguing than anything I guess. Again though, those flaws aside, this is a fun one overall, and getting it free on Tubi makes it worth a look.

One factor that tips it in the direction of working instead of not working is Cary Tagawa was the Yakuza head who's in Mann's crosshairs. It's a really small part, but he takes that small part and elevates it to something more. When we think about his legacy, I know for me, we wouldn't be here with this site if it wasn't for him. Yes, Dolph played a big part in that, but it was two films that Tagawa did with Dolph, Showdown in Little Tokyo and Bridge of Dragons, that were pivotal in my love of DTV movies, and neither of those movies work as well as they do without Tagawa. Other standout moments in his career, everyone knows his video game movie villains in Mortal Kombat and Tekken, which he was fantastic in; but a couple others for us DTV fans have to be Soldier Boyz, which is a ridiculous film, co-starring Michael Dudikoff, but something that Tagawa absolutely sells with his performance; and then his turn as the baddie in Kickboxer 2, anchoring that film as we were getting comfortable with Sasha Mitchell taking over in the lead role. With DTV films, where everyone involved is working on tight margins, to have someone like Tagawa that can some in and deliver something special, he's able to elevate things above the budgetary limitations, which is vital to making everything work at this level. That kind of professional approach, and everything else Tagawa brought to the table, will be truly missed. Here's to you Tagawa-san, you were one of the greatest.

This is the second time in the past couple months that we've seen Michael Biehn in a post celebrating someone else. Back in October we saw him in Billy Blanks's Hall of Fame induction post for Timebomb. The thing about him here is he's clearly in his late 30s/early 40s, and he presents that kind of maturity, so it doesn't make any sense that they dressed him like a 19-year-old. Maybe the part was originally meant for someone younger, but when you get Biehn, you've got an adult, not a twentysomething hosting an eXtreme sports show on ESPN2. In a way though, it kind of adds to the charm of the film, like I don't know what to do with this, and while I'm trying to figure it out, a car blows up or there's a shootout or something. And part of what makes me not know what to do with it, is I think Biehn doesn't know what to do with it either. Like when they gave him the leather scally cap to wear backwards, he had to be like "my kids wear stuff like this!" I'm not saying he needed to wear Dad Jeans, I'm just saying dressing him like a 19-year-old diminished what Biehn brings to the table, and he was kind of working up hill to deliver the goods--which he was still able to do.

We always talk about New York being a character in a movie, but what about when the film is shot in Vancouver with NYC establishing shots mixed in? It's like having Bruce Willis in a Randall Scandal and doubling him for three-quarters of the film. Now we're like "that tall bald guy isn't Bruce Willis!" the same way when a scene takes place in a bus station and I'm like "that's not Port Authority!" The thing is though, does it matter if 75% of the viewing audience haven't been to Port Authority either? And to be fair, in 1998, I would've been one of those 75%, my first trip there was about ten years ago when my wife and I got a bus there from Portsmouth, NH. I will say, when it comes to America bucket lists, going to Port Authority at least once should be on that list. It's right near Times Square and Broadway, so you could go after you take in your Broadway show, maybe get an NJ Transit bus to Hoboken late at night, really get a sense of what the city has to offer. The only thing is, NJ Transit is a mess when it comes to fares, you need an Excel pivot table to find out what your trip will cost, though that might be part of the experience, having to argue with an NJ Transit bus driver about your ticket when they won't accept it because it's not for the correct fare zone.

Finally, we'll end with a second paragraph on Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. In looking further at his legacy, I think he has to go down as one of the best at playing cinematic villains ever. Take Tekken for example. There had to be a thought that "we can't make this movie if we don't get Tagawa to play Heihachi." No one else they could've gotten would've worked as well as he did. And Tagawa wasn't a Hackman or Rickman scenery-chewing villain either, he made sure his baddies were sufficiently bad, there was never any fear of a Destro Effect with him. Even in this movie, where he's a baddie, but not the baddie, you get the sense right away that he's not someone you mess with. Contrast that with Don Stark's mafia enforcer, where we're not sure what to make of the dad from That 70s Show that isn't Kurtwood Smith mean-mugging and killing people. I was trying to think of other baddies in Tagawa's class, like Richard Lynch, but I think Tagawa has more memorable roles; or a Billy Drago, who I think was better at the greasy, dirty baddie, but also doesn't have the memorable roles Tagawa had. We may never see anyone as great as Tagawa again, but that's okay, we saw him, and we have his catalog of movies to celebrate him with.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi here in the States, which I think is a great way to watch it. For your Tagawa movie in honor of him, you're probably better off with Showdown in Little Tokyo or Mortal Kombat, but if you're looking for a fun actioner that you may not have seen before, and get the added bonus of Tagawa, this will do the trick. Again, here's to you Tagawa-san, you were one of the greatest to do it, and you will truly be missed.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118601

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.