Silk (1986)

In looking to get more Cirio H. Santiago on the site, I came across this when Ty from Comeuppance Reviews posted his VHS copy on his Instagram account, tyactionrocks. If you're not following that account on Instagram, you need to, it's fantastic! Anyway, without any further ado, let's see how this one did. This was also reviewed by Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Cool Target Action Reviews, and Mitch at The Video Vacuum, so you can see what they thought as well.

Silk has Cec Verrell as our eponymous hero, working as a detective on the Honolulu police department. She's as bad as they come, and criminals don't stand a chance. When an affluent English gentleman decides to set up his criminal empire shop in her backyard, there's going to be hell to pay.

When an action heroine has her own Pat Benatar-ish theme song, you know you're in for something great, and this only delivers from there. Cec Verrell is fantastic in the lead, the action is consistent, and when the action isn't there, we have other fun moments. This is the kind of movie the DTVC was made for, and the fact that we're almost 1000 posts and 13 years in and I'm just getting to it now is a travesty. Better late than never I guess, and we're here now making it happen. Cirio H. Santiago reaffirms his place in the DTVC Hall of Fame yet again.

This is back-to-back posts with Cec Verrell in them, with her having a part in Hollywood Vice Squad as well, and her third film overall, the other being Hell Comes to Frogtown. In looking at her imdb bio, there isn't much more that we could do of hers, which is too bad, because you feel like from a movie like this she could've had a bigger DTV action career, maybe not quite at Cynthia Rothrock's, but something in the 30 movie range--she wasn't even in Silk 2, which I can't believe after how great she was here. Alas, while the quantity of films was smaller, we're left with the quality, and there is a lot of quality in a film like this for us to celebrate.

I joke often that the biggest trope in movies is film review bloggers using the word trope, but I couldn't think of a better way to describe the damsel in distress trope than as a trope. Anyway, for whatever reason, Cec Verrell couldn't escape it, and despite being the eponymous heroine upon which the film is based, still finds herself captured by the baddies, tied up, and used for bait in the final scene. And the thing is, it felt grafted on, like the helicopter that's only there to be blown up and otherwise serves no other purpose. I'm all for paint-by-numbers, but I think if you're going to make a movie with a woman in the lead who's as badass as Verrell is here, why not skip that part, or have a different female character that you can use for that instead. When we look at some of the other movies we've done this month, Altitude with Denise Richards, Skyscraper with Anna Nicole Smith, Honor and Glory with Cynthia Rothrock and Donna Jason, and Hollywood Vice Squad with Verrell and Carrie Fisher, none of them needed to use the damsel in distress device--the closest I think was Anna Nicole Smith when the baddie in leather pants tries to rape her, and she stabs him with a letter opener and sends him out the window to his death--and all of those movies worked, just like Silk worked. We're okay skipping the damsel in distress, you can trust us to survive if it doesn't happen.

Down below is our good friend Vic Diaz. He, along with our other good friends Joe Mari Avellana and Mike Monty (credited first as Mike Monte, then later as Mike Monty) all make appearances in this. Seeing them in a Philippine action film, especially a Cirio H. Santiago flick, is like watching an old Johnny Carson rerun in bed, or smelling French fries cooking in a fast food joint as I walk by. There's a comfort in knowing they're there, like I know I'm right where I'm supposed to be watching exactly what I'm supposed to be watching at that moment. When we talk about Martin Scorsese's comments about how Marvel movies aren't cinema, maybe what he meant was, they had neither Diaz, Monty, or Avellana in them, and as such couldn't be cinema. I hope that's what he meant...

Cirio H. Santiago is the film's one Hall of Famer, so it's rare to have the Hall of Famer not discussed until this paragraph, but here we are. This is only Santiago's 9th film reviewed on the site, which I believe is the lowest of any Hall of Famer. This is, and has been, a major oversight on my part that I've been meaning to amend. I've mentioned this in other posts, but when I came back from hiatus, I focused too much on newer movies, especially in trying to catch up on all the new Dolph, Seagal, and Van Damme out there, plus the Gary Daniels, Scott Adkins, and Michael Jai White; the thing is though, how often does one of the newer movies hold a candle to something like this? Cirio H. Santiago is in the Hall of Fame for a reason, and one of his films is less of a roll of the dice than a lot of the newer stuff that's out there.

Right now you can stream this on Tubi, or if you have the Shout Factory subscription on Prime you can stream it there too. I think streaming is your best bet, and then you can make the decision after on whether or not you want to ante up for the blu-ray DVD version. However you slice it, this is what you came for, and what we at the DTVC are all about.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091957

Hollywood Vice Squad (1986)

I was looking to get a film by Penelope Spheeris on the site, and I saw this was on both Prime and Tubi, so I decided to make it happen. Between the great cast, and the 80s nostalgia aesthetic, this had DTV Connoisseur written all over it. Let's see how it did.

Hollywood Vice Squad follows a team of vice cops in LA led by their captain, played by Ronny Cox. When a woman from Ohio comes to find her runaway daughter (played by Trish Van Devere and Robin Wright in her first film respectively), she goes to Cox, and he realizes that she's in the hands of one of the worst pimps in the city, played by Frank Gorshin. Cox puts his two best cops on it, Leon Isaac Kennedy and Cec Verrell, hoping they can get her out in time. At the same time, Carrie Fisher is new to the squad and trying to make her name, so she works to take down an S&M video ring that's using underage actors. Her partners don't take her seriously, so she needs to earn their respect first in order to be successful.

This is a lot of fun, as much fun as a movie like this can be despite some of the extreme content. Evil pimps getting young girls from Ohio strung out on drugs and making them turn tricks, or a BDSM porn ring using underage kids in their films, isn't exactly fun; but there are definitely a lot of fun moments, like this one above where Carrie Fisher is undercover trying to get Marvin Kaplan from Alice to solicit her for sex. To some extent, you can see with all the fun moments where we get the Spheeris films from the 90s like Wayne's World or Black Sheep, and that juxtaposition with the tense, harsh moments, combined with the great cast and 80s nostalgia I talked about, makes this one overall a winner.

There's something about the Penelope Spheeris movie, whether it's a feature film, a documentary, or a music video, that feels like the 80s and 90s I grew up in, and this film captures that vibe I've always gotten from her films. I'm a little bit younger than the John Hughes slice of Gen X, maybe a little more Nirvana than Simple Minds--I think they call us "X-ennials" because we're between the two generations--but for me Spheeris is up there with Hughes as an influential a filmmaker in that period, plus her influence went further into the 90s. When I look at her filmography, there are probably some others, like Suburbia, that technically fit the DTV definition, so we could include them here on the site, but I think out of all of them, this is the most DTV in tone and feeling, it's very much a late 80s/early 90s late night cable offering or video store pick, which is something I love going back to.

Out of everyone in this, Ronny Cox is the one most known on this site. He's also on the list of people who have played presidents on this site, along with Jerry Springer, Roy Scheider (twice), Rutger Hauer, Mel Novak, and now Vivica A. Fox after our Crossbreed review. In the Captain America post I said I had trouble reconciling him as a good guy after all the baddie turns I've seen him in, and after seeing him in this, I realize that was a bad take. He's great in this kind of positive leader role, and the same way every scene he was in in RoboCop had a sense of impending menace and doom, here every scene had a sense of good and that whatever was wrong with the world would be taken care of. Here's to you Ronny Cox, you're one of the great ones.

Carrie Fisher is the main person on the cover, but her role is more the lead of one of the side stories. It's kind of crazy to think that 1986 was only three years removed from Return of the Jedi. At that time, beyond Harrison Ford, the rest of the cast was having trouble getting roles, and I think this was one here for Fisher to do something outside the Star Wars realm. While I like the film's running time, and overall think it worked, one complaint I might have is that it would have been nicer if her storyline had a bit more meat to it, because the small amount we did get was great.

This is only our second Frank Gorshin film, the other being Bloodmoon, the Gary Daniels classic. Here he plays a real baddie, much more so than the fantastic Riddler he played on the old Batman series--which, as you know, is the definitive version of Batman for me. According to his imdb bio, he has a ton of other credits, especially in the 90s and early 2000s, that we should get a hold of. Hopefully we'll make some of those happen soon, because I can't think of anything better than an alum from one of my all-time favorite TV shows making it into the DTVC Hall of Fame.

On that note, let's leave it here. This is the Penelope Spheeris late 80s late night actioner that you came for. Great cast, great action, and great nostalgia factor. Right now it's on Prime and Tubi, so you can stream for no money. Definitely worth a shot.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091213

Hell Comes to Frogtown (1987)

This is it. This is the big one. No blog on bad direct to video films is complete without this cinematic gem. It's like reviewing the best films of all time without putting in Casablanca, or the worst films of all time without putting in National Treasure. Well, I've finally got my shit together and here it is. The review, not my shit.

Hell Comes to Frogtown is an hour-and-a-half of pure awesome starring Rowdy Roddy Piper as Sam Hell, a fertile man captured by the women who rule the world in the post-apocalyptic future. His job is to go into Frogtown and free some women and impregnate them. To make sure he doesn't waste his seed on any frivolous sexual forays, the government has equipped him with a chastity belt that will explode if he tries to take it off. Frogtown is this reservation of mutant half human half frog people that smacks of Mos Eisley from the 1st Star Wars. Piper fights his way through them, saves the women, and takes them back across the border to do his patriotic duty.

This has to be one of the most amazing things ever committed to film. Piper was awesome, the frog people ruled, there were plenty of hot chicks, and even more random explosions. This was also intentionally funny, especially the stuff with Piper and the chastity belt. It may have taken a lot from Star Wars: not only the Mos Eisley feel, but also the desert and the sand people like dudes; and the jump from scene to scene was similar to the way Lucas did it, where a windshield wiper would seem to shoot across and reveal the next scene. Of course, Lucas didn't come up with that effect on his own, he took it from Kurosawa.

Piper used roles like this one to cement his place in the DTVC Hall of Fame. He plays this to the hilt, totally getting the tongue-in-cheek vibe. There's no one else who could've played this part. One of my favorite scenes he did was with this frog man who was trying to remove the chastity belt with a chainsaw. First Piper's telling him not to do it, because it might explode. But then the tracking device kicks in, causing him immense pain, so he screams for the guy to saw it off. The look on the frog's face is priceless. Any Piper fan who hasn't seen this isn't actually a Piper fan.

The premise of this is hilarious too. Reading the plot summary off my Netflix package to my friends, they thought it was a porn flick. The idea of a post-apocalyptic future where women rule and most men are sterile is cool to start with. Then throw in the frog people, and you're really cooking. The Piper is just the icing on the cake, and there's a sense that the people making the movie understand who he is, because he uses his patented wrestling moves to get through the frog people.

William Smith is in this as a bad guy, as he usually is. He plays an army dude who wants to kick Piper's ass, then later we find out he's also smuggling goods into Frogtown illegally, using his status in the army and position on the border. This guy is an awesome baddie, and his showdown with Piper at the end is classic. I don't want to give it away too much, but it's cool. Also, Sandahl Bergman plays Piper's love interest. You may remember her as Arnold's love interest in Conan the Barbarian, or as the baddie in Red Sonja.

If you haven't seen this yet, it's an absolute must. If you've already seen it, you may want to see it again. If you don't want to make the commitment to buy it, at least bump it to the top of your Netflix. You won't be disappointed. A definite cornerstone to a night of bad movie viewing.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093171/

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