Outlaw Johnny Black (2023)

This is one I'd been waiting for for some time, once I saw it listed on Michael Jai White's IMDb bio. After how great Black Dynamite was, 14 years was plenty of time in between to get his next effort, and I was excited by the fact that he was going to take a stab at Blaxploitation Westerns. When my cable company offered their $1 weekend rental deal again, I figured that was the perfect time to make this happen.

Outlaw Johnny Black has White as the eponymous hero. He's searching for a guy named Clayton (Chris Browning) who killed his father, but in the process gets mixed up with the law, and finds himself pretending to be a preacher in the small town of Hope Springs. Beyond his own subterfuge, an evil land baron (Barry Bostwick) is trying to take the old preacher's property through violent and corrupt means, meaning someone with Black's skills are needed. A woman named Jessie Lee (Anika Noni Rose) has been mobilizing the townspeople against Bostwick, and while she and Black don't get along initially, she realizes he's the man to help them. But will his past catch up with him before he has the chance?

This is really good. It's 2 hours and 10 minutes long, which is longer than my usual 90 minutes, but I could tell that White, Byron Minns, and company really wanted to go bigger with this, which is something I could appreciate, and most importantly, I think they pulled it off. This is bigger than just a DTV actioner, and bigger than just White and co. dipping their feet into making Westerns, and I think it worked. Like Black Dynamite, the comedy is there, as is the send up to Westerns, but then also the proper tribute to the Blaxploitation Western, a sub-genre that I wasn't as familiar with myself until I started digging more into Fred Williamson's career--Johnny Black's outfit is a tribute to Williamson's in Joshua. White delivers as the hero the way he does in Black Dynamite as well, giving us a larger than life presence but also excels in his comedic timing; and then the rest of the cast does their thing as well, from Minns as the preacher whose name White steals, Rose as the leading lady, our baddies in Bostwick and Browning, and then like Black Dynamite, a whole host of supporting names like Kym Whitley, Tommy Davidson, Jill Scott, and Randy Couture, among many others. This is the movie I was looking for from White as a next film after Black Dynamite.

This is only Michael Jai White's third film of the year, which isn't great considering the number of stuff he has out there, and that was a big reason why I wanted to get this one as soon as I could. When I had Jon Cross of After Movie Diner on the DTVC Extra podcast to talk about Bloodfist III and IV, we talked about my top 5 DTV actions stars of all time, which are 1. Dolph, 2. Williamson, tied for 3. Wilson and Rothrock, and 5. Gary Daniels. He asked me if Wilson could ever move up that list, and I didn't think so, that if any change could happen in the top 5, it might be as we go on with Williamson that he may pass Dolph. With that in mind, in looking at Michael Jai White, he's someone who could crack the top 5 and maybe go higher, based on stuff like this. I mean no one other than Williamson has ever made anything like this before, let alone Black Dynamite as well, and that has to weigh heavily into a ranking like that. If you go 6-10, I have 6. Lamas, 7. Seagal, 8. Dudikoff, and 9. Van Damme. I used to have Adkins at 10, but I think at the very least White is tied with him now, if not passing him into the 10th spot with a film like this. White is not only a dynamic martial artist, but he's a dynamic overall talent, and he shows us that again in this film.

With a Western featuring black and white characters, the issue of the N word is inevitably going to come into play. If you look at Williamson's Westerns in the 70s, white characters threw the word around constantly, to the point one of his movies even had it in the title. Then you had Tarantino's Hateful Eight, where Samuel L. Jackson's character gets called it a lot. White and Minns in writing the script went a different route here by using a word that's similar but not the same. It's still close enough that I feel awkward using it in this review, but I liked that they did that. There's a debate around using that word in an artistic sense. Who should be able to say it or write it, especially in Tarantino's case as a white person writing dialog for white characters that are saying it. White and Minns don't even mess with it, but they do joke about it, like when a baddie goes to call Johnny Black a "Ni--" and gets kicked in the face, and while he's on the ground says "I was going to say nincompoop!" I think it just gets back to the fact that White and Minns and the rest of the people making this and Black Dynamite are working on a different level.

People have sometimes complained that I'm too hung up on runtimes, which is fair, even though it's pretty consistent among the DTV/low-budget movie blogging/podcasting community that anything over 90 minutes is borrowed time, which means as a filmmaker you need to make more out of that time to make it worth it for us. More often than not, those 100-minute plus films don't manage to make that extra time worth it, and for Michael Jai White, Byron Minns, and co. to go in planning to make something over two hours, it was a gamble, but one that paid off. I'd say around the 45-minute mark the film loses steam a bit, but for the most part it manages to stay entertaining throughout. Part of it is the writing, and Jon Cross made a point about this when he was on the DTVC Extra podcast I mentioned above: humans can only laugh or be scared so much before it comes too much. What White and Minns do to mitigate that is they give us enough that's entertaining without while giving us a break from laughing or feeling tense, which, combined with a story that progresses along pretty well except for that one slower patch I mentioned. The thing is though, it is a gamble, and it requires great material. This movie is the exception that proves our 90-minute rule, but it is the rare film that's worth that extra time.

Finally, Fred Williamson has a cameo at the end along with Jim Brown and Michael Madsen. The issue then is that make this Williamson's 30th film on the site! I considered holding off on this one so we could get a better film for his 30th post, one that has him in it more, but I thought that would be too ridiculous, especially when I had this film watched and was planning to review it in this slot, to make it sit for a month or more while I try to get another Williamson post in? The other thing though is, while he only has this one cameo, he has it because the film is paying tribute to his influence and contributions to the world of cinema, so I think that combined with the fact that I can just make his 31st movie be the one where he gets the full accolades, made the decision to just go ahead with this review an easy one. It's a really great scene, where he and Jim Brown are watching everyone from a balcony at the end, and they recognize the job every did making the movie and upholding the traditions they started in the 70s.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can rent this on Amazon Prime or your cable company here in the States. From a money standpoint, you have to decide what your budget is, but I think renting something like this has the added benefit of showing the studios that a movie like this can sell, it doesn't need to be all comic book heroes or Bruce Willis to draw us in.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8667828

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

The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power (2015)

I watched this I don't know how long ago on Tubi, but when I went to grab images for it, it was gone. Rather than rent it just to get images, I held off on this review, until finally our cable company had a free Starz week, and I was able to get it from there. Was it worth the wait? Well, it has Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Rutger Hauer, so two Hall of Famers helps. In addition to us, Bulletproof has covered this as well.

The Scorpion King 4 has Victor Webster back as our hero. While on a mission with a friend, said friend turns on him. That's because said friend is an evil prince in disguise who is looking to unleash a supreme ancient power. Our Scorpion King Friend (SKF from here forward) can't abide that, so it's quest time, and who better to go on a quest with than a fair blond rogue of a woman (Ellen Hollman), with whom our hero can have all kinds of screwball comedy will they or won't they romance. His Girl Friday this ain't, but after all manner of great cameos, will our hero stop this evil former friend and save the world?

This clocks in at a robust 105 minutes, and I had a hunch that would hurt, but with the robust cast, including two Hall of Famers, I knew I needed to review it for the site. I took one for the team, but definitely, that runtime comes complete with ample padding to harm your sensibilities. I don't really know why though? This is trodding the usual sword and sandal ground, so what was so important in there that they couldn't fit it all in in 80 minutes? And then with the cast, beyond Hauer and Wilson, we also had Michael Biehn, M. Emmet Walsh, Barry Bostwick, and Lou Ferrigno, plus a host of MMA fighters like Big Country Roy Nelson and the great Royce Graci, and WWE star Eva Torres. Yet none of those stars spent much time in the film, so they weren't able to help us over the slow parts as much as you'd hope. What about the action? Good action could've mitigated some of these issues too, but unfortunately that wasn't there either, despite us knowing how great Webster was from the Seagal film A Good Man, and Hollman was from Army of One. I think this had great intentions, but maybe those intentions got away from itself. Sometimes less is more.

We're at 39 movies for Don "The Dragon" Wilson, despite this one not having him in it much--or are we? Two films that were in his IMDb filmography, Siege of Firebase Gloria and Saigon Commandos are no longer listed, and I have him tagged for both. Does that mean he's at 37? Letterboxd also no longer lists those, so I guess I need to remove them too. So 37 for Don, which is also a first that anyone has ever lost tags before. Anyway, after Don did The Last Sentinel in 2007, he didn't do anything until he took a part in Lou Ferrigno's 2012 short film Liberator, and then this in 2015. 2015 squares with when I went on my unplanned hiatus, so at that time we thought we had all of Wilson's DTV films covered. Not only has he since done more films, but new ones appeared in his back filmography, and while some have been taken down from his IMDb, some still remain that need to be covered as well, so even losing the two, the 40 Club is only a matter of time for him. With Rothrock already in, I think it'll be fitting for him to be the fourth actor ever in. Had I not been on hiatus and saw this when it came out, this minuscule part of his would've been a disappointment after the hiatus he'd taken; but I'm watching it now in the 2020s, when he's back and working again, so it's really just adding another tag for him, which, if this film gets us nothing else, that's worth it.

Much further from the 40 Club, our other Hall of Famer is the late, great Rutger Hauer in his 19th film on the site. His role is only slightly bigger than Wilson's, but we've been used to these scant Hauer roles from the site's inception, so this was old hat for us--in fact I think "bait and switch" was originally the "Hauer bait and switch" with all the times he's on the cover but barely in the movie. He does have more starring roles in the past that would be good for the site, but a lot of times they close in on that 2-hour mark. Considering it's Hauer, I could probably suck it up. Watching this in 2015 we didn't know we only had 4 years left with Hauer, but he left an indelible legacy, and it will be good for us to go through the ones on the site that fit with what we do here. He made the Hall of Fame based on his reputation with those films, even if I hadn't covered them yet. Truly one of the best to do it, Mr. Hauer will be missed.

Another big name in this who we've had the pleasure of covering one time before, is M. Emmet Walsh. Roger Ebert's rule that any movie with Walsh in it can't be bad is seriously put to the test here. My relationship with him isn't as good as that, as I wasn't a fan of his character in the other film of his we've done here, Red Scorpion--which also means we seem to only do Walsh films with "scorpion" in the title--and even joked on the podcast episode we did on that film with Will from Exploding Helicopter that the scene where Brion James burns him with a cigar was an applause scene--and maybe the better one is in Critters when he's thrown out of a house. Could that be a new site, "M. Emmet Walsh Put Through the Ringer"? He's not really put through the ringer here though, at least not that I remember. It's a shame, the film probably could've used him getting tossed onto a full table of sword and sorcery spread with meats and fruits and goblets, it splitting in half under his bulbous weight, the spread collapsing on top of him, and then we cut back to him, disheveled with grapes in his hair and maybe a large leg of some poultry provenance that somehow made it into his hands in the commotion. He looks at it, shrugs his shoulder, then takes a bite and tosses it over his head. Either way, Mr. Walsh, you are one of the greats, and I kid because I love.

Finally, with this being another lackluster entry in the Scorpion King series, what would I do to fix it? First and foremost, there would be an 88 minute rule. Anything longer needs to go back to the editing room. Not only was this one over 100 minutes, but so are parts 2, 3, and Book of Souls. Okay, so we've made them shorter, now what? We need a hero with more personality, and maybe Webster can do it, but not with that hair and that beard, and he needs better material. If we're only rocking with him for 88 minutes though, maybe we don't need as much. We also need a stellar baddie, as the one we had here didn't cut it either. Maybe a Bruce Campbell? But Webster can't cut it with Campbell then, we'd have a Destro Effect. How about Michael Jai White? Just give him this franchise and let him get after it. Maybe have an installment directed by Jesse V. Johnson, and one by Isaac Florentine. Now the action is where it needs to be. If you've got names like those, think of the names they could add: Iko Uwais, Tony Jaa, Scott Adkins, Amy Johnston, Louis Mandylor? Now we have something. Instead of being a franchise that trades on a name for streams and rentals, it could be a franchise people actually anticipate the next installment of.

And with that, let's wrap this up. I think this might still be on Starz, but if not, I would only do this on a free streamer or one you already subscribe to. It's longer than it needs to be, with not enough action, and not enough scenes with some of the great names.

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Undercover Brother 2 (2019)

Netflix suggested this one to me, and since I was trying to get more Michael Jai White on the blog, I figured it would be a perfect fit.  Of course, as we always know, "perfect fits" at the DTVC usually equate to duds, so hopefully this one proves us wrong!

Undercover Brother 2 has Michael Jai White as our hero, as Eddie Griffin doesn't reprise his role from the first one.  In the early 2000s, he and his brother Lionel are frozen in an avalanche in Austria while trying to take down The Man, played by Barry Bostwick.  They wake up in modern times, but White is still in a coma, so Lionel has to come back to America and defeat The Man's latest plan.  As Lionel tries to reorient himself with the modern world, he and The Man discover that The Man's son plans to take over the world by poisoning everyone with a drug called Woke, which makes people into ultra Liberals first, then turns them into hypersensitive over-argumentative social justice warriors that try to kill each other over disagreements.  Can Lionel crack this case and save the world?

This movie was fantastic.  Yes, after we find out White's character is in a coma and Lionel, played by Vince Swann, will be taking over, there are definite bait-and-switch fears.  But then he's sent to a new hipster coffee shop in his old, now gentrified neighborhood, and it's just all good from there.  Swann and the rest of the cast turn in a great performance, the action's fun, the jokes work, and the commentary does a great job of critiquing modern discourse from the Left, while maintaining a healthy does of denouncing the bigotry and hate we've seen from the Right.  I think this is the kind of movie and message we need right now in 2020.

And after I got through that early skepticism and fear that we'd have a Michael Jai White bait-and-switch, when the movie became something much more, I realized that I should have trusted White's judgement that he wouldn't have signed onto a project like this if it wasn't good.  And his character does find his way into the film more, which helped.  I saw him on an interview he did for VladTV, and in it he said he didn't want to be known as only an action guy, because you can get locked into that--and action guys have a reputation for not being able to act too.  At first the thought as an action fan is "why do we need you act when your martial arts skills are so fantastic?  Just give us a well-choreographed fight every 15 minutes, and we're good."  But later in the interview he talked about some of the things he's been through in Hollywood, like filmmakers saying to him "what we need is a white you," and then it makes more sense that he needs to show how versatile he is, because he won't always get those action films we want to see him in.  One thing I like about a movie like this, or the exceptional Black Dynamite, is we get to see him do both: be a comedic actor that is also an expert martial artist.

Barry Bostwick is fantastic as the baddie.  When we last saw him on the DTVC, he was FDR in FDR: American Badass!.  What's great about his baddie is Bostwick is clued into current events, and he uses that to shape his baddie the same way the rest of the cast uses it to shape their characters.  I looked at his imdb bio, and he's been working a lot lately.  It feels like more and more actors are going the Eric Roberts route, trying to get in 5 or 6 credits a year, which is great, but often there's a lot of variability in the quality of all those projects.  This is one at least that I can say is good.

One of the problems people run into when they criticize the hypersensitivity and cancel culture that can plague the modern Left, is they end up gaining the sympathy of people who hold extremely pernicious views on the far Right.  This movie does a great job of straddling that line by making sure that, as they make fun of a guy with a Man Bun, curly mustache, and cardigan he picked up in the women's section, they also keep reminding us that Neo Nazis marching in VA are the real bad.  I think that's one of the issues that has come in the backlash to Cancel Culture, really problematic views have found sympathy, when they really shouldn't have.  That's an advantage in a 90 minute movie versus a 3-minute segment on a cable news talk show with 4 panelists divided by boxes via satellite, or worse, a rapid-fire Twitter pile-on, is that a message can be made, and then the message can be added to and shaped so we gain a full understanding of what is trying to be said, and that kind of approach is something we need more of now I think.

Going back to the Man Bun guy, who we discover is in cahoots with our main baddie, it's a phenomenon that I think, like the Fanny Pack, isn't going to be like "oh that's so dated," but rather "that was never in, even when people were doing it."  In the 50s we thought 2020 would have us all in one uniform, probably shiny metallic, gender normative (did you like that?), there's no way we could have predicted that a man with a bun, a curly mustache, and woman's cardigan sweater, would ever be something that men who consider themselves "hip" would ever wear.  I will say, I think 2020 is a bit late for that, that that was maybe more a mid-2010s thing, but it still happened.  I mean, no one saw that coming.  Back to the Future II didn't have guys in Biff's gang rocking Man Buns and curly mustaches, and if it did, we'd say "is this Back to the Future, or the Leslie Nielsen parody version?"  So when our hero Lionel encounters Man Bun after being frozen for 15 years, he reacts the way that we all should have been reacting all along.

All right, so I enjoyed this movie, I think it really worked for me.  Right now it's on Netflix to stream, so it's easy to get your hands on.  For me, it's worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6843446

FDR: American Badass! (2012)

After the 90-minute awesomefest that was Poolboy: Drowning out the Fury, this was highly anticipated.  It had a short theatrical run in the fall, and then was released on Netflix Instant, where I eventually put it down. I was ready for Barry Bostwick as FDR to destroy me with his wheelchair of death.

FDR: American Badass! has Bostwick as one of our greatest presidents ever, FDR, who is bitten in the leg by a werewolf and contracts polio, which confines him to a wheelchair.  He then wins the presidency, only to discover that the dictators Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, are plotting to spread werewolf-ism throughout the globe, and they know FDR is the only man that's badass enough to stop them.  The question is, can he do it?



Is there any question?  This movie is what you want from a Ross Patterson flick.  It has all the dirty jokes and bad action spoofs we loved in Poolboy, only it's frickin' FDR doing this stuff.  And the idea of werewolves as the Axis Powers is genius.  If I'm comparing the two, I'd give the edge to Poolboy, but it's not FDR's fault Poolboy was the greatest film since Citizen Kane.  FDR still has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and more than gives you your money's worth.  This is American history done right.

The key to this film is how well the actors play it straight, especially with Barry Bostwick in the lead.  Yes, he's definitely having fun, but he also never betrays his part and always plays it seriously, even when he's delivering some absolutely ridiculous lines.  He buys into what FDR is all about, and by doing that, he gives us the movie we want when we see that title.  And from there, it's as if everyone else follows his lead and does the same thing, which makes this whole thing work.  They create a world where the silliness of FDR makes sense to them, which makes it all the funnier to us.



Keven Sorbo should be up for a best supporting actor nod for his cameo as Abe Lincoln.  He's so fantastic, and I love seeing him in Patterson's films.  Speaking of Patterson, he plays a senator from Georgia, and his accent makes everything he says funny.  I have no idea how anyone can act opposite him and give a good take, because I know I couldn't keep a straight face.  Bruce McGill, who played Dalton in MacGyver, is essentially Bostwick's straightman as Louis, FDR's personal bodyguard, and he's great in that role.  Eleanor was played by Lin Shaye, and what was funny about her, was she was the only one who wasn't an anachronism.  It was almost as if she was taken from the 30s and dumped into the 2010s.  I loved veteran character actor Paul Ben-Victor as the Mussolini werewolf, he's always great to see.  Finally, Patterson's character's wife was played by Keri Lynn Pratt, who, according to her imdb bio, is from Concord, NH.  Nice to see the Granite State get some shine in FDR: American Badass!

I left Ray Wise as Douglas MacArthur for this paragraph, because I've noticed that Twin Peaks is really popular on Tumblr, at least among the blogs I follow.  And this isn't people my age or older who remember when Twin Peaks first aired, these are kids who were barely alive and have found it on Netflix or DVD.  Yes, I was only 12 when it first came out, so it's not like I could've been a good judge of what would still be relevant 20 years later, but out of everything that was on TV then, Twin Peaks would've been at the bottom of the list.  Anyway, the question now is, who is more likely to bring the Tumblr kids in to watch FDR: Bostwick and his Rocky Horror fame, or Ray Wise and his Twin Peaks fame?  And why can't it be Sorbo and his Hercules fame.



Last summer, I visited the JFK Presidential Library in Boston.  It was a really cool experience, and made me want to visit some of the others.  The next closest to where I live of course would be FDR's in Hyde Park, NY.  After seeing this movie though, I feel like maybe we should organize a DTVC field trip down there-- or up there, depending on where you're from.  I don't want to sound like Mitchell, but does anyone living in New York have a sofa I could stretch out on?

All right, before we go way off the tracks, let's wrap this up.  If you haven't seen Poolboy yet, stop reading this immediately and go watch it.  Then, finish this review, and go check out FDR: American Badass!  Ross Patterson/Saint James St. James strikes again.  If history had been this cool in high school, I might have actually wanted to get up in the morning and go.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1811315/