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!

Phoenix (2023)

This is one Ty and I covered back in October on episode 136 of the podcast. We weren't sure what the film would be, but it wasn't anything that we ended up getting. I'll dive in on the review.

Phoenix is a Tubi Original directed by Daniel Zirilli that has Natalie Eva Marie (not "Saint") as Fiona, a soldier serving in Afghanistan who finds out from the general she's serving under (Neil McDonough) that her father (Randy Couture) has been murdered by a drug kingpin in Miami named Maxim (Oleg Prudius, not the magazine). She's granted leave and heads home to see if she can find out what happened. She dyes her hair pink so it matches her real hair color, and goes to work, leaving a path of destruction behind her, as she unlocks the mysteries of her father's death, and comes to terms with her complicated relationship with him. At the same time, Maxim won't go down without a fight, so he has a guy on his security team hire some former cops and other mercenaries to take her down. Will they succeed?

Ty and Brett always say cult classics can't be manufactured, they just happen. Samurai Cop, Miami Connection, The Room. And while I think we can say this wasn't meant to be on that level either, it also just happened, the thing is though, we have a catalog of competently created films by Daniel Zirilli that would make you think he'd be the last person to produce something that could belong in that pantheon. It was definitely produced on the quick, and that explains a lot of the line deliveries that seem off. One take and done, no matter how wooden or unnatural it sounds--though then you juxtapose it with someone like McDonough who can pull it off in one take, so his scenes with Natalie Eva Marie make her delivery seem even worse. On the other hand, as bonkers as this is, the underlying concept is a good one, a female-led John Wick, and in a production that had more time to shoot multiple takes on a bigger budget, Natalie Eva Marie would be great in that role. And in a weird way, that's what makes the whole thing work on a certain level, we have this bonkers dialog combined with a plot that's a bit all over the place, while we also have a lead that works and a basic premise that we'd want to see. Plus it's free to stream on Tubi, which always helps.

Daniel Zirilli is the only director who I've currently seen each of his last six films--when I finally see Dolph's Wanted Man he'll pass Zirilli on that, as I'll have seen his last 8--and none of the other five, plus two others of his I've seen from before then, Locked Down and Circle of Pain, are at this lower level of quality, so I have to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one that he had to rush it. It follows a common pattern that he's used in four of the five before this too: a lesser-experienced actor as the lead with a variety of other big names around them that he can put on the tin, and often he's taking a premise that was used in another film and putting a spin on it (Renegades is the one exception, but as a collaboration with Shogun Films it's unique in his filmography). I think with those other four, he had more time to shoot the scenes to get the dialog right, or make a call on removing dialog or a scene that didn't work; plus he had more people in those other films that could nail it on one take. But there were also story elements that were kind of wacky that didn't need to be there, like Maxim setting the mayor of Miami on fire. I guess the thing is, if you're going to have a rough outing, at least have it be interesting and a fun watch, and this one is definitely that.

Ty and I joked about Natalie Eva Marie's dialog delivery, but to be fair, she did well enough considering the circumstances. There's a scene that's a classic in the "You're tearing me apart, Lisa!" mold when Marie just starts screaming and breaking vases, and then the guy she's working with comes in and is like "is everything okay?" and she says "it's self-inflicted." If Zirilli wanted to make a movie with me in the lead I probably would've done that scene even worse, and I think if he'd had it to do over again he wouldn't have put her in that spot to do that scene, or didn't bother including it. On the other hand, she has this scene where she infiltrates Maxim's club in a long red dress, and starts taking out all of his men. It was the kind of thing that, in a better-produced project, would've been iconic, and at the very least tells us she can do this, and do it at a high level. Don "The Dragon" Wilson also had to work on the dramatic part of things when he was starting out, the key is I think as she's figuring it out, she needs parts where the film doesn't need her dramatic element as much. A great comparison we've seen recently is Most Dangerous Game, where CT from The Challenge had a similar level of experience to Marie. In that film, he was always paired with one of the experienced actors in the cast--Judd Nelson, Casper Van Dien, or Tom Berenger--plus Van Dien was such a fantastic scenery chewing baddie. One thing I didn't realize as well, is this isn't the first time we've seen her, she was also in Hard Kill, which I covered on my own "Mini Willis Fest" episode back in October of 2022, number 110 in the archives.

As we often see in a Zirilli film, there were a whole host of other names in this. Going off the Most Dangerous Game comp, Bai Ling was great as Scavenger, part of Maxim's inner circle, but she would've been better as the head baddie, and similar to how Van Dien offset CT's inexperience, if Ling was just told to crank the volume up to 11 and rip off the knob, it would've been a better counter to Marie's inexperience in delivering her lines. Ling's second in command was Phillip Tan, and he and Marie had a good fight that ends suddenly when she grabs a hammer and bashes his head in. We also had Randy Couture, who gets killed off at the beginning, and then we only see him in flashback sequences with another actress playing a younger version of Marie, so he and Marie never have any scenes together. His partner, who has even fewer scenes, is Chuck Zito, someone we see from time to time here at the DTVC. Finally, there's Neil McDonough, who we've only seen one other time on the site, in the Brian Bosworth flick One Tough Bastard aka One Man's Justice, which we covered all the way back on September 3, 2008. He seems to be in all kinds of DTV stuff now, so I imagine we'll see him again. Even in his scenes with Marie, I don't know how many they actually shot together, he just comes in, wears army fatigues, smokes a cigar, and talks about having intel on Maxim and his gang. Another thing we've seen in Zirilli films is teasing a sequel at the end, and in this case it gives us a sense that Marie becomes a part of McDonough's special forces team fighting human trafficking. What I'd like to see is this get combined with Invincible, and have Marie team up with Johnny Strong in a sequel to both films.

Finally, I've never been to Miami before--the closest I've gotten was Sunrise, which is north of it and technically part of the greater Miami metro area--but I used to listen to a sports radio show broadcast from there that's hosted by sportswriter Dan Le Batard, and on Fridays he does a segment titled "#BecauseMiami" with reporter Billy Corben that goes into all of the corruption and shady dealings that go on both behind the scenes and out in the open in Miami politics. With that in mind, the idea that this baddie Maxim needed to keep a customs inspector bound and gagged in his underwear in a shipping container to get him to play ball with all of Maxim's illicit shipments entering the Miami port, or even that he would need to burn the mayor alive to keep the mayor from taking him down, seemed unnecessary. I think both scenes could've been removed, and we would've just taken for granted "#BecauseMiami" instead of wondering how Maxim got away with everything. Miami is a fascinating city here in the States. It's a top 10 metro area, and with the climate it has and the amount of rich people living there, it should have the kind of status that a New York, Chicago, LA, or Bay Area has, but between the local corruption, and the fact that at the state level there's a fear of a metropolis like that controlling everything with its population and voting power, it has this artificial ceiling that it can't break through--and that state-level fear we see having a negative effect in other major cities' growth, like Dallas, Houston, here in Philly, and now with an emerging Atlanta. There are elements of that that could've played well in this. Instead of just burning the mayor alive, what if the mayor's looking to make Miami into something bigger, and he and Marie are uneasy allies with a common enemy in Maxim? And maybe there's a state-level actor like a gubernatorial candidate who's in cahoots with Maxim, because Maxim's criminal enterprise plays well with rural voters who fear crime in cities? In fact, outside of Marie's mention of stone crabs, there's nothing really uniquely Miami about this, which is something that I think could've been leaned into to prop the film up more.

And with that, I'll wrap this up. This is a Tubi Original, so Tubi is the way to go in the States. Unfortunately yes, it's something to include in a double-feature with a Samurai Cop or Miami Connection--the latter of which would be pretty apt since they both take place in Miami--but there were some positives to take from it as well beyond any so-bad-it's-good enjoyment.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28362655

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

Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance (2015)

During my time on hiatus, one of the greatest cult classics ever released a crowdfunded sequel, and when I came off of hiatus, I saw it as a priority to get it up as soon as possible. But then other things got in the way, as there were tons of other films that I needed to make happen in the meantime, so this ended up languishing in the hopper. Well, we're finally making it happen, so let's see if it was worth the wait. Also, our friends Mitch at the Video Vacuum and robotGEEK's Cult Cinema have looked at this, so you can go to their sites to see what they thought.

Samurai Cop 2 takes place about 25 years after the first one. Matt Karedas (Hannon) is called back into action after a Yakuza gang war ignites, and his old partner tracks a series of medallions at the crime scenes to Karedas's forgery (is that the right name for a place that makes things out of metal? Blacksmithery? Mintery?) All the while, there's a mysterious woman who's hooking up with Matt, Bai Ling is acting off the chain, Tommy Wiseau is there, and Joe Estevez and Mel Novak, oh my!

I don't know where to go with this. It's not like the last one where my hang-up over the Bacon Grease Fu made me question what was an otherwise great time. In fact, I had to watch this one twice, because I couldn't believe I didn't love it right away. How could I not like something where Joe is ordering kombucha on a plane? Or a film that has Mel Novak seemingly just to have him? Mel Novak is there for my benefit as a fan of these kinds of movies, and to not like this film felt a little ungrateful. But the issue is something Ty and Brett from Comeuppance Reviews said on a podcast where I brought up this same issue: you can't manufacture a cult classic, and I feel like therein lies the rub. Take the Joe ordering kombucha on a plane scene. At the same time, we have the restaurant concierge from the first one wheeling out a drink cart, and then Bai Ling comes with the dial cranked up to 13, screaming and sending this floating ball into a mass of CGIs, causing a fight scene with more CGIs all over the place, and we're left with a sense that it's all too much. You had me at kombucha, you didn't need the rest.

By the same token, when I get to the credits and I see all of the people who donated getting a thank you from the filmmakers with all of their names listed, there's another part of me that appreciates everything they were trying for here. The best analogy I can come up with is the cheesesteak here in Philadelphia. I like mine with cheese wiz on it, but not all places that make them get how it should be done. Some just slather it on the bun like they're painting a barn, and I don't know that they're doing it that way to be dismissive--some are for sure--, I think they're doing it to be like "you like wiz? I got you man!" The really good ones treat the wiz like they would provolone or American, they put it on the shaved rib-eye while it's on the grill with the onions, so all three meld into something both unctuous, and disastrous for my arteries at the same time. I think this movie slathered on the wiz, instead of doing like they would one with provolone, and the result, despite the best of intentions, was too much. I think if they had played it straight a little more, and let the onions, wiz, and shaved rib-eye come together, that mess of grease, cheese wiz, meat, and carmelized onions on a roll still would have had the punch they wanted, it just wouldn't have felt like too much, so we would've gotten it down better.

Bai Ling is exactly what I'm talking about here. Bai Ling unleashed on 13 with the knob ripped off is too obvious and too much; but Bai Ling on 6, like she was in The Breed or Circle of Pain, and she elevates the material she's working with beyond its limitations, like the budget, but it's still something that we as an audience can still have a lot of fun with. The movie overall felt too much like an everything but the kitchen sink kind of deal, and maybe in some instances you need that, but for a Samurai Cop sequel, we don't need it. Hell, I think you rearrange the plot and make Bai Ling your queen baddie, again, let her play it straight, but still have fun with it. Bai Ling is someone who can pull that off.

I'm all for the classic, buy up everything at the local fetish store, cast some adult actresses, and load up on all the low-budget mainstays you can find--Julie Strain made a great career in films like that, but again, I come back to the fact that, as fun and low-budget as a lot of her movies were, they played it straight. Shane Ryan, Tommy Wiseau, and Lexi Belle can all work, but I think it becomes too much if it's let's be as goofy as possible and not care what happens. Part of what made The Room a cult classic on its own was the fact that Tommy Wiseau was playing it straight. I'm not saying not have fun with it, and I had fun with elements of this, it's just at a certain point this turns from being the funny kid in school to being the kid who jumps on his desk and you're just hoping the teacher will send him to the principal's office; and the thing is, I was pulling for this movie, and it pains me a bit to say it ventured into the latter territory for me.

That begs the question then, what would your Samurai Cop 2 have been? There's a part of me that thinks it should have been a scene by scene remake of part 1 with Bai Ling in Robert Z'Dar's part. Or at least a similar idea to part 1. Use Wiseau and Ryan if you need to, but make them bit parts, like guys Joe has to question for information--or maybe since Ryan does all those exploitation films, he could be the guy Ling has to sneak into the hospital to behead. Get a lot of that green screen and mysticism out of there, go bare bones like the first one, or like a classic AIP actioner. You can still be in on the joke and play it straight. And then maybe incorporate some of the goofiness of this. Maybe Wiseau is a goofball when they need to interrogate him. Maybe Bai Ling has one flip-out scene on her henchwomen--who can still be Gentlemen's Cinema actresses in outfits from the local fetish shop--in fact I think it's even better if they're there and you're playing it straight.

This is a tough no for me, which is different from a hard no, even though tough and hard can mean the same thing, in this case they don't. I wanted to like this, and at moments I did, but overall I think it was played too goofy, and playing it that way didn't work they way it should have. Right now you can stream it on Tubi, and I think that's the best way, that way you'll know if you like it enough to plunk down the cash for the DVD.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3398252

The Lazarus Papers aka The Mercenary (2010)

This is one I've had on my radar for sometime, but it was having trouble making it to the States.  Finally Netflix got it on DVD, but I was hoping they'd make my life easier and put it on Instant.  No such luck.  Let's see how it went.

The Lazarus Papers has DTVC Hall of Famer Gary Daniels as a white slaver in Thailand who kidnaps girls from the outer villages and brings them to the city to work as hookers.  One girl in particular he's kidnapped, Krystal Vee, has been selected for his marriage scam, where a man thinks he's buying one of Daniel's hookers for his wife, only to be robbed on their honeymoon by Daniels and left broke with no hooker.  When he tries this scam on Tommy "Tiny" Lister, he's busy doing drugs with his other hookers while Krystal Vee is stuck keeping Lister happy, and when Lister isn't, she kills him.  Lucky for her, as she's escaping, her other future husband, a man about to die of a terminal illness, sees her in the hotel hallway, and they run away together.  Oh, and DTVC favorite Danny Trejo is this guy who can't die and heals people.  He wants to die after Daniels kills his wife, and he's sees this terminal illness guy as a potential replacement.  But can he convince him to live forever?



At best this movie is clunky and plodding, at worst it furthers the Creepy White Guy Fetishizing Asian Women meme, and in between there's plenty of unintentional silliness that we can look at later.  First off, it's just kind of a weird movie, and not in a good way.  The idea of a girl from a small village watching her mother gunned down, then spending a year of hell as a Thai prostitute shooting drugs and contracting HIV, is just not a really fun story, and you need to be a top notch writer to be able to spin that story into something worth watching.  A weird white guy dying of a terminal illness working as the proxy for Creepy White Guy-dom is not that the thing to do that.  There's a scene after Krystal Vee is kidnapped where we see her suffering through her hell, taking pills with mascara stained tears on her face, and I couldn't help thinking "why are we doing this?", and here I'm barely ten minutes in and thinking that.  And to find out it's only to play out Creepy White Guy fantasies with some construct of a guy who lives forever and can heal people clunkily grafted onto it just left me feeling blah.  Daniels, Trejo, Vee, and Bai Ling as the madam were all solid, but they couldn't save this.

Let's start with Daniels, who is the film's resident Hall of Famer.  He actually does get a little martial arts on near the end, but he's a baddie so we don't really want to see it.  Also, he's not fighting anyone with comparable skills, so it's kind of a waste.  He does a good job as a baddie though, even though this kind of baddie is especially despicable.  I'm not sure though that the film ever really gets at just how bad he is.  Like the murder of Krystal Vee's mother and the year in hell as a white slave just seems to be like "okay, that happened, now enter weird white guy with money who only wants her companionship to save her."  None of this is Daniels's fault though, and he does the best that he can with the role he's given.



No, that's not Faker Danny Trejo, it's what people in this movie look like as they're crossing over to the other world.  Yes, that's right, we turn into the Faker version of ourselves.  It wasn't just a cheap way for He-Man to make money, by painting He-Man blue and calling him Faker, it was based on reality.  Who'd'a thunk?  This would've made for the best movie though, right?  Danny Trejo versus Faker Danny Trejo, maybe with Gary Daniels somehow involved.  Imagine the knockdown-drag-'em-out fights they'd have?  I'm seeing 2-by-4s, bottles, motorcycles-- hell, this could've been the next Machete movie!  The evil Conservative racists created their own Faker Danny Trejo to kill immigration reform and rally the country around their jingoistic cause.

All right, let's get into this Creepy White Guy thing.  When I was in college, I went to San Francisco for the American Anthropological Association meetings, and I saw a talk a woman gave on her paper called "Little Brown Fucking Machines Powered by Rice".  In it, she discussed this fetishization of Asian women by white men, and how it manifests itself in their interactions with Thai hookers.  The biggest thing she talked about was how these guys would want the woman to tell them how she loved them, and act like she was with them because she wanted to be, not because they were paying her.  We get all of that here, "I'm giving you the money because I want to help you, not to buy you," "you don't have to sleep with me if you don't want to..." "oh, I want to..."-- all the reassurances that he's not just another Creepy White Guy.  Then she transforms into the good Asian, diminutive, caring for him when he's sick, being everything these liberated white American girls supposedly are not.  It's one thing to see this kind of thing play out in a bad action movie where I'm not taking everything seriously, but this is supposed to be more of a dramatic picture exploring deeper themes, and all it is is the same Creepy White Guy grossness.



Watching the film I wanted to call this guy a Poor Man's Forest Whitaker, because he kind of looks like him, and had all his mannerisms.  Turns out he's Damon Whitaker, Forest's brother.  The brother is the best kind of Poor man's though, isn't it.  Don Swayze and Frank Stallone are two great ones that come to mind.  We also have Joe Estevez, though to me he's really more his own thing, not a Poor Man's Martin Sheen.  Anyway, Damon Whitaker was pretty much as described, a Poor Man's Forest Whitaker, and brought everything to the table you'd expect from a Poor Man's Forest Whitaker.

All right, so this is a pass for me.  Beyond the Creepy White Guy-ness, the overall story didn't work.  It was weird and clunky and, while we had some good performances, when the story is rough, what else can you do?  As I mentioned, this is available on DVD from Netflix.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1247400/

Circle of Pain (2010)

About a month ago I reviewed a film called Locked Down. In the comments section of that post, two things happened. First, our friend Ty at comeuppance reviews, gave us the term "punchfighting movie" when describing this UFC/TapOut sub-genre of low-budget martial arts films, complete with the tatted bruisers, songs performed by Disturbed derivatives, and sea-sickness inducing MTV film edits. Second, our friend Jason over at elementarybeatboxoperator,storylike made the joke that he might handle these films better while under the influence of Mountain Dew. And thus the Punchfighting Movie Mountain Dew Doritos Experiment was born.

I decided to go back to my movie watching roots for this one. On a recent free day, after my morning walk and a quick shower, I planted myself on the couch and had Mountain Dew and Doritos for lunch-- that's it-- while I watched two recent Punchfighting movie efforts, Circle of Pain and Beatdown. Below is a picture of what I put into my system:



And no, Mr. Anonymous from Unrivaled, it wasn't this:



Before I get into the review, let me just say that I was ill equipped physically to deal with the ramifications of what a lunch of Mountain Dew and Doritos meant. I was lightheaded, felt some tingling in my left arm, and thought on numerous occasions that I might have what the competitive eaters call a "reversal of fortune". As late as midnight-- twelve hours later!-- I was still feeling these effects. I know as a blogger the idea is that junk food is considered an average meal for us in our parents' basements; but in the real world, as an actual person, I'm too far removed from my college days when I used to pull this kind of shit and get away with it. My body just doesn't find it funny anymore.

Anyway, so here we are, onto Circle of Pain. It stars rising Punchfighting guy Tony Schiena (Locked Down) as a former fighter who broke his buddy Dean Cain's back with a spin kick (believe me, it was hilarious). Five years later, Bai Ling, who runs the MMA outfit Schiena used to fight for, decides that he needs to fight again against her champ, Heath Herring. She twists his arm by evicting Schiena's baby mama and daughter out of the house Ling provided for them, somehow circumventing any landlord/tenant laws in the process. Now Schiena must overcome his regrets for what he did to his buddy and climb back into that ring triumphant.



I don't know if it was the Mountain Dew or what, but this wasn't too bad. Yes, the scene where Schiena breaks Cain's back is hilarious, and the flashbacks after are even better-- "I play that moment back in my mind, just thinking 'why didn't I kick him a little higher!'" The fight scenes outside of the ring were pretty clunky, like the one with Kimbo Slice, pretty much just wait, punch punch, wait, punch punch, wait, kick, block, throw, repeat; but the final fight inside the ring was great, one of the best MMA dramatizations we've seen in this sub-genre. Also, it was refreshingly light on the MTV gimmicky camera effects. Schiena in the featurette called it the "Rocky of MMA", which is what Unrivaled technically was too, but this was much better. The plot didn't stray too far and get weird on us, and Bai Ling as the MMA organization president was too perfect for words in my opinion. I would say it's more Rocky V than Rocky, but it was a good Rocky V.

Tony Schiena worked better here as the hero than he did in Locked Down, though I have to say he didn't work in the latter more because of the convoluted plot that made him act in awkward scenes than it was him. I do love that he always speaks in these breathy tones, like he's an obscene caller or something. "Hey Dean Cain, do you know who this is? What're you wearing? Are you wearing corduroy? Ooh, I can hear you swish swishing around the house as we speak..." He's a great fighter though, so hopefully he'll get more and better work.



Speaking of the devil, Dean Cain plays a paraplegic. In the featurette, he said he wanted this role because he knew people who were paralyzed, and he saw how they lived very full lives in spite of their disabilities. That brings in an interesting question: is that good enough for you Dean Cain fans out there? What I mean is, is not seeing him fight that much enough for you, if you find out after the fact why he took the role he did? It's one of those things about the featurette, because it explains a lot, but do you except the explanations if you were looking for something else? I was fine with it, even before finding out about why, but that's just me.

One of my favorite MMAers, Frank Mir, has a small, clunky cameo where he gets his ass kicked by Heath Herring. Again, in the featurette, we find out he was just doing it to get his feet wet in the acting world. I'm good with him doing that, but by putting his name on the cover, it's a bait-and-switch. Also, his fight scene wasn't very good at all. Wait, punch punch, wait, knee knee, throw. If he's going to go the next level and get a bigger part, I'd say make him a cyborg or something that throws people a lot and breaks their arms with nasty jiu-jitsu holds. That would rule. As an aside, the background of his one scene is a sick Shelby Cobra-- at least I think it is, I don't know cars that well.



Bai Ling was awesome, and if you see her in the featurette, she's even more awesome. The first thing she says is "this movie is better than drugs, alcohol, or anything else you're taking." Umm, Bai, what exactly do you think I'm taking? Oh wait, that's right, Mountain Dew. Then she says the director was a genius for casting her, because she was playing a part made for a white man. Simply beautiful. I could have done with her in a better haircut, and the leopard print nail polish was a little bit much, but otherwise, she totally sold it. It was one of the elements that elevated this from the run-of-the-mill Punchfighting film.

All right, so final verdict, clunky fights, but a really amazing last one; a pretty funny storyline, especially when you see the actual kick to the back; a script that uses the word "fucking" as its go-to verb; yet also a great Bai Ling; and a hero who speaks in breathy tones but is a solid fighter and a guy worth rooting for. It's the Rocky V of MMA films, which isn't so bad a deal. Again, maybe it was the Mountain Dew that made me lighten up, but I didn't hate this.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1541664/

Locked Down (2010)

This film fell to me after a few above it on my Netflix queue weren't available. I was skeptical, because my previous experience with UFC movies hasn't been great; but Vinnie Jones and Bai Ling (Ling Bai?) gave me some hope. Let's see if I was right.

Locked Down is half Death Warrant half Undisputed II, as Tony Schiena plays our framed cop hero sent to prison and forced to fight in a prison fighting circuit run by a crime lord he put away a while back, played by Vinnie Jones. After your classic prison film cliche scenarios are out of the way-- from the chief guard beating our hero with a billy club, to the old prisoner that our hero is lucky enough to have as his cell mate that shows him the ropes (and suddenly becomes his trainer), to the near shanking in the laundry room-- we get our final showdown between Schiena and his man, while an internal affairs hottie investigates his case so she can clear his name. That's pretty much it.



A big warning here to anyone with epilepsy. I'm not being facetious, this is a legitimate concern. There are so many half-a-second jumpcuts that it could cause a serious issue. I grew up with a girl who had epilepsy, and she said she wasn't supposed to play the Nintendo because it might induce an epileptic fit. Well, if the Nintendo could do it, this film could really do it. Also, if you're prone to seasickness, you might have trouble with this film too, because in the few spots we get a shot for more than a half-a-second, the camera is moving all over the place. I could go on about the non sequitur theater in the dialog, or the fight scenes that were good but not that good, or the fact that Bai Ling was almost wasted, and Vinnie Jones didn't have as much license to be cool either, but none of that matters as much because I just couldn't see anything! All right, maybe it matters, because this was your new classic get a bunch of buff tatted dudes in a room, slow down the footage for a second, crank up a Disturbed derivative song, then just watch the tatted dudes punch each other in 80 cuts; but I think this was even worse than that.

Igniame if tihs psot was wtitern eleirtny lkie tihs? How mcuh wluod taht scuk? Taht's waht it's lkie wnithcag tihs mvioe. If my bolg lkoeod lkie tihs, no one wloud raed it. It's fnitsrrutag, huh? The wlohe pniot of wniacthg a mvoie is to see it, rhgit?

I'll stop that, but you get the point. I listened to some of the commentary, and I got the sense that there was a genuine effort here to deliver a decent product, that they didn't think the audience was stupid, that they weren't using this constant cutting to prevent us from seeing their shortcomings as directors or fight choreographers, which makes the end result perhaps more puzzling. In another element they had in the fights, our view would be obstructed by other spectators, which I guess was meant to give us more of a feel of immediacy. In the commentary, they rued the fact that they couldn't find more extras for those scenes. Are you kidding? The whole reason we watch a movie, especially at home, is so we have an unobstructed view. I'm not watching Locked Down to see pieces of a fight around the head of some dude in front of me, and you're saying you wanted more heads in my way? Come on man. And at another point, they talked about the two tatted bad asses they had for a fight, and how cool that was. Sure, it would've been, if all the fights weren't two tatted bad asses, or if we had even been able to see it! If we had more traditional martial arts one-on-one battles-- that we could actually see too-- this change of pace with two huge tatted beasts would have been great. By that point though, we'd seen too much of it, and it came off as old hat.



Films like this are notorious for non sequitur theater. Between the scripts that are rushed to completion, the dialog that ends up looking better on a quick read-through than it does when acted out, the actors that don't exactly have the pedigree to understand when this stuff sounds silly or doesn't fit and try to act through it anyway, to the quick shooting schedules that mandate keeping takes that really don't work just to make sure they had something. I get all of that, and so when some non sequitur theater rears its ugly head, I try not to be too harsh on it... but (there's always a but, huh?), there was one scene we were put through at the very beginning that was too much. Our hero has sex with his girl after a long time away undercover. The sex seems great, but after, she, apropos of nothing, turns on him and says he's never around and he doesn't care about her. Schiena, instead of saying "um, honey, did you take your medication?", he's like "what do you want me to do, it's my job..." and the whole thing becomes weirder and weirder as the acting and dialog becomes worse and worse. The thing is, none of it was necessary. He had no other love interest until the very last scene, so it's not like they needed to get her out of the way; plus, they had no need for the internal affairs character anyway, so she could have played his girlfriend from the start. Why did he need to be framed at all, if he's already an undercover cop, why not just send him in to take down the fighting ring? That one little wrinkle, that he was framed instead of sent in, was not enough to keep it from being a Death Warrant rip-off, so why not go all the way? The thing is, all of these issues would be forgivable if we just had some great action that we could actually see.

The music isn't bad, but I think maybe it's used too often as a crutch, and the director himself admits that he wanted the music to get the film through certain scenes. That's not the way to think about music in movies, though. You want there to be some conflict, that the two are bringing something that the other isn't to the table, in order to create one whole experience. What we got here, because the music was filling in too many gaps in the movie, was a series of glorified music videos. Imagine if Vinnie Jones smashing a guy's head in the car door in Snatch was done in the style of this film: Jones would toss the guy into the open car in slow motion, at the same time, we'd hear a driving guitar rift, followed by a rest, like da-duh, rest, da-duh, rest, da-duh; then Jones goes to the car door, the high-hat kicks in, and we see the top half of the door's window, moving to shut; then some guy kicks in with a noise like "bro!", and the music begins in earnest. From there, we're getting bombarded by images of Jones' face, the bottom half of the body hanging out of the car quivering with each impact, the hood of the car with blood splashing in it, a shaking air freshener (probably something ironic) hanging from the rear view mirror-- all in quick succession, all to a driving Disturbed derivative. I get that you want to showcase these bands and get them some exposure, but either you're making a movie, or you're making a music showcase, and if it's the latter just let us know, and we'll go somewhere else for our action movie.



I love Vinnie Jones and Bai Ling. I also loved a lot of the UFC fighters in this, and Tony Schiena was kind of cool too. The thing is, none of the people on the cover, Vinnie Jones, Bai Ling, Rashad Evans, or Kimobo Slice, are in the film much at all. I get the thinking behind why Tony Schiena isn't on the cover, because he's not as well known, but why not make him known? At least put him on the cover with these guys. And as far as Bai Ling, she was a prison guard, and only had one hot scene with Vinnie Jones, and that was it. Anyone who saw Crank: High Voltage, knows how great Ling can be, and for this film not to even try beyond that one scene was a real disappointment. Jones was a little better, but it was really more the idea of Jones we were seeing, as opposed to him being Jones, if that makes sense? We accepted him as his character in the film, because of all we'd seen him in. Essentially, after Snatch or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, movies like this cast Jones knowing they don't need to build his character much-- he's like ready made Contadina crushed tomatoes, the question is, can you add the right ingredients and cook the dish properly to make the most of those crushed tomatoes?

And the answer is no, a resounding no. But that's not to say the film makers didn't have good intentions, or that they can't bring it the next time around. I think we'd all agree, no matter how postmodern our philosophies, that the one trait every movie needs to have, whether it's Ran, Koyaanisqatsi, Pulp Fiction, or One Man Force, is it needs to be visible. We need to be able to see it. I think that's kind of a big deal, and that's where this movie missed the mark. Hopefully next time around, they'll rectify that, and we'll be able to (literally) see what they can do.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1597033/

The Breed (2001)

I bought this movie solely for the Adrian Paul factor. If I had a blog on syndicated action programs, Adrian Paul would be a first ballot hall of famer. In terms of the DTV market, he still has some work to do, and unfortunately movies like this don't help.

The Breed is a vampire flick that for some unknown reason seems to take place in the same world as Terry Gillium's Brazil. Adrian Paul plays a vampire detective, who's paired up with human cop Bokeem Woodbine to try and track a vampire serial killer. You may remember Bokeem from films like The Big Hit and Caught Up, which were essentially DTV movies, except someone made a mistake at the top, and tried to make money with these duds in movie theaters.

The Breed has the perfunctory vampire raves, but tries to meld them with this old Eastern European aesthetic. It's like Blade meets Werner Herzog. Also, Bai Ling is in it, and she wears a bunch of outfits that don't make any sense. There's a plot somewhere in there, and Bokeem and Adrian don't know who to trust. That leads to a shoot out on the docks and a lot of vampires flying around on cables. The director must've liked the effect in Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" video.

One thing I totally dug about this film was Bokeem Woodbine's lines. Early on he enters a room announcing "Come out with your hands raised" in the best voice ever. He tops this later when he says "I don't care" in this whiny, crying voice that is just fantastic.

That being said, there's a lot not to like. Adrian Paul's Eastern European accent. Bai Ling's outfits. The whodunit/conspiracy/who-do-you-trust plot. When I watch a DTV vampire flick, I'm not looking for Film Noir, I'm looking for either bad action or bad horror. Blade 2 is probably my standard for a good vampire flick, and I'm not too sure that that's too much to ask from any production.

Overall, I wouldn't spend any money on this. Even if you're a big Highlander: The Series guy like I am, it's not worth it. I spent $4.88 on it, and I'm not sure I got my money's worth. I showed it to my other DTV friends, and we laughed and made fun of it all right, but there was other stuff we'd rather have been doing that with. Like Blade 2. If you see it on your program guide, TiVo it only if you have enough room. I wouldn't erase any episodes of Laguna or Days for it, though.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265104/

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