Repo Jake (1990)

Our friend Jon Cross over at the PM Entertainment Podcast has been doing a celebration of PM films this month called "SePMtember," and I thought I'd get in on the festivities with this PM flick I'd been meaning to watch for a long time. In addition to us, we have a legit Murder's Row of other reviews, with Chris the Brain from PM, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Mitch at the Video Vacuum, and Simon from Explosive Action all having covered this as well. A sign that I'm long overdue to join the party.

Repo Jake is an early PM joint featuring the great Dan Haggerty as the eponymous hero, a burly fellow from Minnesota who moves out to LA temporarily because he hears the repo business is booming out there. Once he gets on with a repo company, it doesn't take much for him to rise to the top of the rag-tag fun group of fellow repoers--and fortunately the people he needs to repo cars from are just deadbeats, we wouldn't want to have to think about people struggling to make ends meet and falling behind on their payments during the recession in the early 90s, would we? Anyway, one of those deadbeats is a pimp and porn producer, and after Jake repos his car, he gets revenge by threatening Jake's new lady friend. Now he has to win a demolition derby-style race for said pimp--oh, by the way, Jake was a former Indy car driver. Wonders never cease.

There are a few places you can go with this. From a PM standpoint it's fun to see the seeds of some of the things that would be hallmarks of their films appear here, like people being thrown through windows, exploding cars, and Cole S. McKay appearing in a scene. The wave is starting to build here, and it's like we're wading in the water, watching the wave come in, waiting for those PM classics to come in push us to shore. There's also the 90s nostalgia. I loved seeing Haggarty come in on a Trailways bus--try not to think of someone with his massive frame having to sit on a bus from Minnesota to LA though, Christ, I'm 5'7" and my back and knees are seizing up just thinking of that trip! But the third element is taking it as a film on its own merits, and that may be where it falls a but flat. We get the classic PM action to start, but they hadn't developed that every 10-15 minutes rule yet, so we get dead spots too. The race scenes were hard to follow, and I couldn't make out where anyone was. And then the music, if it wasn't a wailing harmonica, it was a Casio preset whimsical theme. With all that in mind, while I usually use the term "connoisseur" ironically--and I guess I still am here--you have to really dig this kind of thing to enjoy it, which I did, but not everyone will.

We're now at 52 PM flicks, and if it seems like I've been covering a lot of them lately, you're right. This is three months in a row with a post, four months out of the last five, and 7 of the last 9. This is the earliest one we've watched in a while though, you can tell from that early logo, and between the logo and the script on the opening credits, it was a lot like Shotgun, only without the too-sweet theme song. There were other hallmarks of PM that we could see here too. Like when one of the repo guys fell asleep, and some of his coworkers put lipstick on him, then woke him up and sent him out on a job. That was it, nothing else happened, like the kids who put the pizza box in the oven in Riot and then after Chinese food with Daniels, are never heard of again. Another hallmark I mentioned above was Cole S. McKay, who had a scene driving a car Haggerty is trying to repo. Before you know it, Haggerty is on the hood hanging on for dear life while McKay is driving all over the place. It was a great way to get McKay's 62nd tag on the site. We also have Merhi's direction with Pepin's cinematography on a Jacobson Hart script, and Paul Volk working on post-production. With all these names working together, they were able to refine their craft with each successive movie, which I think more than anything was what made PM so great, each film was part of the process, not just a one-off.

This is only our second Haggerty film on the site, the other being Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan, which we reviewed in 2013. It does seem odd that 1300+ posts in and this is only his second film, especially when we have a classic like Elves that I discuss with Mitch on the podcast every year around Christmas. And it's in that mid-80s to mid-90s period where he did a lot of DTV damage, so I probably should make an effort to get more of his stuff up. He does have another PM flick, from the same year as this, Chance with Lawrence Hilton Jacobs, where Haggerty also plays a repo man, just not the same one he plays here. The thing about him that's so great is he has this avuncular quality that always makes him endearing to watch, whether it's as a race car driving repo man in penny loafers like he is here, or when he's tearing it up on Battle of the Network Stars. For all the things about this film that didn't work, he's definitely one that does.

We generally don't do our McDonald's paragraph this early in the post, but it is the 16th film we've had with a McDonald's, so I feel like maybe they've moved past the penultimate paragraph territory. And the thing is, similar to Presidential Portraits, I wasn't always tagging them in the past, so sometimes when I rewatch things we've already reviewed, I catch one and add the tag. Could we see McDonald's getting into the Hall of Fame on the Danny Trejo rule? I've looked at other fast food places, and none of them appear as much as McDonald's, I think in part because the one from this film and the one on the Vegas strip are in a lot of films from this period. Recently I made a trip to Chicago to see a White Sox game (ballpark number 14 for me!) and before my flight back I hit the McDonald's flagship location, where they have some international offerings, including the Big Arch Burger. Not to be confused with the Arch Deluxe, the Big Arch is two quarter-pound patties with white American cheese and this Arch sauce, along with some other accoutrements. The white American cheese was a bit strong for me, but otherwise I liked it. The best way to describe it? It's like what the rest of the world must think of American cuisine in the form of a burger.

Finally, for our actual finally paragraph, would you look at that sweet, late 80s Texas Rangers cap. There's a little mark in the middle, which I think was meant to obfuscate it enough to avoid MLB's lawyers calling to complain, but otherwise it's perfect. In 2023 I was lucky enough to be in Dallas for work, and was able to get a Lyft over to Arlington to see a Texas Rangers game (ballpark number 11). I looked online, and no place makes this version new anymore. As far as the ballpark, if you get a chance, it's worth seeing a game there. When I went, I got a cheap seat in the upper deck, but one of the ushers told me to sit in the section below that because they hadn't sold out, something I've never had an usher do before. The problem with the park though is there's no public transportation out there, and it's not in Dallas. For someone who goes to games here in the Northeast, and who doesn't drive, being able to take the subway--or even a light rail option--is much nicer.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can get this on Prime, which is a great way to go. It's probably a deeper cut PM, you've gotta really like movies like this to enjoy it, but if you do, I think you'll have a great time like I did.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340312

Pick up my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan (2013)

I've had this in my Instant queue for sometime now, and last week I noticed our buddy Moe Porne on my Twitter feed talking about it. I asked him to give me his thoughts when he was done, thinking I might review it, and he told me I'd get a kick out of it, so here we are. As an aside, you can catch Moe on his Drunk on VHS podcast hosted by Couch Cutter, a fine site I used to write for from time to time. 

Axe Giant takes place in the Minnesota wilderness, where a boot camp operator takes some troubled teens to rehabilitate them in lieu of a stint in the pen.  Things go from bad to worse though when one of the little brats rips a horn off an ox skull lying on the ground.  Turns out that skull belongs to Babe the Blue Ox, and Paul Bunyan is an enormous twisted man-child with a penchant for murdering people who desecrate Babe's burial ground.  Now everyone is in for it.



This one was pretty fun, but its ending was all over the place, which betrayed the proceedings.  There was one thing I had a real issue with that I'll get into in my last paragraph because it contains spoilers.  It was definitely a low-budget schlockfest that worked both as a time killer and a good bad movie night option until that ending, when it kinda wasn't as much fun anymore.  It definitely had those great low-budget touches though, like I loved that they just took a National Forest ranger office or something, slapped new words over the sign, and passed it off as a juvenile detention center.  And Joe Estevez combined with a scant Dan Haggerty added more laughs.  Paul Bunyan himself was a great baddie, and the idea of making him a horror villain was fun too.  As someone who used to watch Maury, I also appreciated the way they made fun of the drill sergeant in the boot camp episodes.  It had a lot of elements like that that worked, and I think even with the bad ending, it might be fun enough to get you to the church on time.  On the other hand, it's not very remarkable, and with all there is to chose from on Instant, maybe not worth it.

Joe Estevez played the crazy local, and I couldn't figure out what to do with him, but the fact that he was Joe Estevez was enough I guess.  He was playing the stereotypical Southern backwoods crazy, even though he was supposed to be from Minnesota.  It's hard to tell if he was just overacting because he's a D-movie actor, or he was doing a spoof on that character from most horror films.  That's the problem with a lot of modern low-budget horror flicks, they try to have this meta-spoof quality to them that insulates them from criticism, because they can say "oh, we were making fun of that kind of thing, we weren't actually doing it."  The Asylum seems to have made a cottage industry out of that, but theirs often work better.  On the other hand, if you don't trust that Estevez was spoofing old horror flicks, and think he was overacting, you can at least make fun of him.



The Maury boot camp episode has always been the biggest crock to me, and this film really got that right-- which is a reason why I'm inclined to give them a pass on Estevez's character.  I've always seen it as these moron drill sergeants who suffer from a form of Little Man's Syndrome and get off by yelling at defenseless kids.  I remember one when a girl on the show, after being berated by the audience and the drill sergeant while her mom played the innocent victim, said "but my mom is doing drugs with her boyfriend all the time", and the drill sergeant yelled at her "this is about you, not her!"  No, really it's about you being a mental midget Mr. Drill Sergeant, and this movie nailed that with their own drill sergeant, played by Boston's own Thomas Downey.  He was a total jerk to the kids and the counselor, played by Kristina Kopf, who was sent to help the kids.  I kind of wished he'd done it even more, been like the real morons you'd see on Maury, but I guess this was good enough.

If you've been rockin' with me for sometime, you may know I enjoy hiking, and not just any hiking, I like to go up good-sized mountains, hit some steep sections, and really give myself a kick in the pants.  But I'm in good shape, and I enjoy it.  That's why it was funny to see the drill sergeant take the kids on a hike for punishment, and I had to realize that for most Americans, that would be a punishment.  Like the hike I just went on yesterday in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  I had a great time, but it had some long steep sections that would not be a lot of people's idea of fun.  I guess one person's past time is another's punishment.



SPOILER ALERT!!!!   SPOILER ALERT!!!!   SPOILER ALERT!!!!
As I mentioned above, the end of the film was all over the place, and it started with Paul Bunyan killing one of the kids, Rosa, played by Victoria Ramos.  She's developed as an honorable and just character, who has a young daughter that she wants to regain custody of once she's out of the pen.  The kind of character we want to root for, or at the very least, don't want to see die because she has a young daughter.  Of course the film then decides to off her.  Really?  How mean-spirited can you get?  That's just bad form, and ruined an otherwise fun horror flick.  From there it gets worse, when her friend Marty, played by Cliff Williams, is killed by Joe Estevez in a fit of craziness as Estevez tries to stop everyone else from killing Paul Bunyan.  It was just weird and an out of place way to knock off another character.  It just seemed like the film couldn't figure out how to end things, and the ending is the most important part.
END SPOILER!!!!   END SPOILER!!!!   END SPOILER!!!!

So that's it, and we didn't even get into Martin Kove's son Jesse, who plays one of the kids, or Dan Haggerty as a Grizzly Adams type who runs a logging operation up there in the late 19th century.  It's all kind of hit or miss I guess, and while this has its moments, the ending ultimately kills it for me, but you might not have as much trouble with it.  At least it's on Instant, so it's not much of an investment.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1684548/