Deadly Impact aka Impatto mortale (1984)

With this weekend being the Super Bowl here in the States, and with the Kansas City Chiefs one of the participants, I figured we'd do a Fred Williamson film, considering he played in the first Super Bowl for that same Chiefs team. Also, this is a good time for us to officially celebrate his entry into the 30 Club. In addition to us, the guys at Comeuppance and The Video Vacuum have covered this, so we're completing the triangle with our review.

Deadly Impact has Bo Svenson as a detective on the edge who likes to crash cars. He's investigating the murder of a young computer programmer along with his hustler/helicopter pilot buddy, Fred Williamson. They discover the murdered young man had software that allowed him to see when slot machines in Vegas would hit, and some baddies wanted all the money he'd won. Now it's a race against time, as the baddies are looking to kidnap the young man's girlfriend to find out where their money was, and our heroes need to stop them. Will they make it in time? And if they do, how many cars will Svenson crash in the process?

This is a fun one for sure. As Ty and Brett said in their review, this is an Italian production rip-off/cover movie of 48 Hours, and with that in mind we'd rather have Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson than Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. The two of them are a fantastic pair and have great chemistry, which makes them enjoyable to watch. It is a bit on the dark side (John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band?)--I mean, our baddies are leaving a trail of bodies all over Phoenix that would make most mass killers in history blush. That said, when people aren't being murdered, the car chases are fantastic. Just when you think they could be going on too long, one of the cars suddenly flips over somethings and lands on it's roof. How do you not love that? And Svenson's character in particular seems to love crashing into things--the moment he borrows someone's car you know that's it for it. The helicopter chase we get near the end was fun too, culminating in a sweet helicopter explosion. The other thing is, for the juvenile minded of us out there, of which I count myself among them, the word "hacker" hadn't been coined yet, at least not officially, so the term used in this was "computer penetration," and what we know of as "cyber security" was "penetration prevention." I'm giggling about it as I'm writing it. Finally, speaking of Phoenix, we get some nice shots of the city in the 1980s, plus even better, shots of 1980s Vegas, which looks fantastic. If you can find a copy of this, it's worth checking out.

For years we've been talking about getting Fred Williamson into the 30 Club, and when we finally do it, it ends up being a tiny cameo at the end of The Outlaw Johnny Black, so while this is technically his 31st film on the site, I figured we'd use this one to truly celebrate his entry--though even this one is more of a Bo Svenson film, with Williamson playing his sidekick. In less than a month from my writing this, he'll be 86 years old, and he still has in production credits on IMDb. Even without those, I count around 25 films of his that we could do on this site that we haven't yet, so the 40 and 50 Club are definitely possibilities, I just need to review his films at a more consistent clip--which has been the thing that's kept him out of the 30 Club for so long. There's also the element of him being a director, with him being the only member of the 20-10 Club--20+ films as an actor, 10+ films as a director. We do have a couple more of the films he's directed that we can do here as well, I just need to track them down. One thing I liked about this one, was it was an Italian production, but it didn't take place in the future or after the apocalypse. Not that I don't enjoy seeing Williamson in those films too, but this one was a nice change of pace. One of the greatest to ever do it, finally joining the 30 Club here at the DTVC. It's an honor that's long overdue and well-deserved.

As I mentioned above, this also has Bo Svenson. In looking over his bio, I didn't realize how similar to Dolph he is. Both from Sweden, both came here to study--Dolph mechanical engineering, Svenson metaphysics--both fell into acting, and both are 6'5" and athletic. The big difference I think is the size of the big break each got, where Svenson's came in replacing Paul Newman as Robert Redford's co-star in The Great Waldo Pepper, and Dolph's was as Ivan Drago in the hit blockbuster Rocky IV, which led to the lead in another blockbuster, Masters of the Universe. The two did team up in The Killing Machine, which was directed by Dolph, so we at least have that. As far as team-ups go though, it's his work with Williamson that's the best, and this film is another example of that. In Williamson's later films, Svenson would often play a baddie, so it was cool to see the two of them working together and bantering with each other, as Svenson crashed Williamson's car that only had two notes left on it.

We get to use the McDonald's tag for the twelfth time, as this film has not one but two locations, one in Vegas, and then the one above in Phoenix. While I have had McDonald's in Vegas before, I've never been out of the Phoenix airport to have been able to get it there--I did get it near the Grand Canyon though, so I have had it in the state of Arizona. What's great here is the baddies are using the payphone at McDonald's, which I don't know if we've ever seen before. Before the advent of the mass availability cellphones, I remember using payphones at McDonald's, smelling the fries cooking, the scent almost like an anthropomorphized hand pulling me in like you might see with a pie cooling on a windowsill in an old cartoon, I couldn't wait to get my call done so I could get inside and order, despite having had no plan to get anything prior to making that phone call. It was a business model for them that went away when payphones were no longer necessary, but back in 1984 it was in full effect as we watched the two baddies go inside after their call, seemingly unable to resist the siren song of McDonald's. Here in Philly many of the McDonald's near us have closed, so instead of that great French fry smell, it's the Popeye's fried chicken, which can be just as alluring.

Finally, I caught this billboard advertising Arizona State football games on the radio as this car flew past it. It reminded me that in 1984 the Phoenix area didn't have an NFL team yet. I looked it up, the St. Louis Cardinals moved there for the 1988 season--in fact St. Louis has lost two NFL teams in my life, first the Cardinals, and then they got the LA Rams in 1995, where they stayed until they moved back to LA in 2015. It's a strange concept to the rest of the world I think, that in US pro sports--and Canadian when those teams play in the US pro leagues--teams can move around like that. In fact, two of Phoenix's four professional teams are from other cities, as they got their hockey team, the Coyotes, from Winnipeg--don't worry, Winnipeg eventually got Atlanta's NHL team, so they have NHL hockey again. This also shows how much Phoenix has grown in the 40 years since this film was made. They went from having only one top tier professional team, the Phoenix Suns of the NBA, to now one in each of the four sports; and is also now the fifth largest city in the US by population if you just go by city limits, more than doubling their population between the 1980 census where they had just shy of 800,000 people, to the 2020 census, where they had over 1.6 million people. You'd like to think this film helped that trend of growth, but actually there was a 10% dip in population growth between 1970 and 1980, where they had 35% growth, and 1980 and 1990, where they only had 25% growth. My hunch is seeing Svenson driving around like a maniac scared some people off.

And with that, let's wrap this up. I caught this on Plex here in the States, but you can see that that version they have available isn't much better than a VHS rip on YouTube--in fact, you even get the same tracking issues at some points--and Plex is one of the worst for commercials, every 15 minutes you get about 150 seconds-worth, which is a pain, but it's better than nothing, and this is worth checking out however you can.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087461

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

Warriors of the Wasteland aka New Barbarians aka I nuovi barbari (1983)

In the interests of getting more Fred Williamson on the site, this is one that had been in my Tubi queue for a while, so I figured why not finally make it happen. Of course, when I went to watch it, Tubi had taken it down, so I went to Plex--which it turned out was a bad idea, because Amazon had it on Prime, which I'm already paying for. Anyway, in addition to us, Ty and Brett from Comeuppance have covered this as well.

New Barbarians takes place in 2019, after the nuclear holocaust, as civilization is picking up the pieces. A gang of ruthless gay men called the Templars (led by George Eastman and Ennio Giralami as Thomas Moore) is roaming the countryside, wiping out any last vestiges of humanity. When they try to kill Alma (Anna Kanakis), fortunately our hero Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete as Timothy Brent) is there to save the day. But now they want to kill him too, so they track him and his new ladyfriend down, only to have Nadir (Williamson), an archer with exploding arrows, save the day again. After finding a large group of extras from the "Life in a Northern Town" video living nearby, they know it'll only be a matter of time before the Templars come to wipe them out too. Will our heroes be enough to stop them?

This is a ton of fun in every way you'd want a movie like this to be a ton of fun. Fun Williamson. Fun cars. Fun outfits. Fun characters. The fact that the baddies are gay puts an interesting spin on it. When our hero gets his prerequisite torture scene, it includes the main baddie Eastman... well, violating him. I wasn't a fan of it happening to Rothrock in Lady Dragon, and I'm not a fan of it here, but they did it, and our hero gets his revenge by jamming a large drill that was built into his car through the back of Eastman's car and into is... well, you know. All of it adds to the overall manic nature of the film though, where shit just seems to be thrown together in this bouillabaisse that in the end all works for a fun time. Why is there an Italian version of Dennis the Menace who lives alone and works on cars for people like Scorpion? Who knows, but it's great, and when he joins Scorpion and Williamson in the final battle against the Templars, it's just as great. The other thing is the Italian touch to this. Enzo Castellari directing, Fausto Zuccoli as DP, and Claudio Simonetti's score give this a feel you don't get in your usual exploitation flick; plus all the great Italian names, like Giancarlo Prete aka Timothy Brent, Ennio Giralami aka Thomas Moore, Anna Kanakis, and Venantino Venantini as the leader of the "Life in a Northern Town" extras. This is the fun Italian post-apocalyptic flick you came for. 

The Hammer is one movie away from the 30 Club, a club he should've been in a long time ago. We've said I don't know how many times that we're going to make an effort to get more of his films on the site, and here we are in December with his last post having been in May. Ugh, what happened? What usually ends up happening, I lose track of him and he goes months without a review. Anyway, we're here now, and this is some great Williamson. He's the cool, slick Williamson you want, even in that ridiculous post-apocalyptic Italian movie get-up. All of it is too fantastic for words. I'm trying to think what a good 30th post would be for him. VFW is one I can get with AMC+--and we're looking to get rid of that streaming service, so probably sooner rather than later for that. He has some great ones I'd like to do from the 80s and 90s, but the availability is limited. There's also Vegas Vampires, which is one he's directed that I'm having trouble finding, but has a great cast. Whatever I decide, I should make sure I just do it and not go another six months before I do a Williamson post again.

The 80s Italian low-budget post-apocalyptic film is a unique piece of cinematic history. The outfits, the props, the actors and the extras, combined with Italian cinematic tradition, gives us something that the people who invented moving pictures couldn't have fathomed, but that we as film watchers are lucky to have. In terms of where this film sits in that tradition, for the most part it not only works, but might be one of the finest of the craft. Where I find fault is with Anna Kanakis's heroine character. They went through all this trouble to give her a sexy, futuristic outfit, but they never really show her full body. Most of the time we only see her from the waist up, and more frequently only the neck up. I'm wondering if there was something wrong with the outfit, because it almost seemed on purpose. Maybe there was a wardrobe malfunction. They definitely didn't do that with Giancarlo Prete's see-through plastic top during the end fight with the baddies, we got that in all its glory.

You can see I got something of an action shot down below there. This is made possible by Prime's desktop browser streaming interface. As far as I can tell, only they and Netflix use one where you can get a clean screen after pausing. For example with Tubi, the time bar and film's title stay on the screen after you pause. Most are like Tubi's unfortunately, which means I need to hit "PrntScrn" while the video is playing, and hope I got it, something that can really limit my options for screenshots. I originally caught this on Plex, and when I went to grab images from that it was a mess. First off, their slider box doesn't give a small box preview of what the later part you're hovering over will be, so I need to remember the times I want for my screens and hope I'm accurate; but then with how their advertisements load, the desktop player constantly crashes. Fortunately I had Prime as an option for this, making my life easier. 

Finally, let's go back to the above image. Is that a fanny pack Scorpion is wearing? I mean there's definitely a cod piece there, but does it also function as a fanny pack? A lot of these futuristic things have multiple functions, so you never know. I was thinking the fanny pack didn't exist back then, but I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it said as early as 1954 a leather version was marketed to skiers. Considering that looks like leather, could the filmmakers have found one for sale at an Italian ski resort in the Alps and just threw it in as part of the costume? Or maybe one of them was a skier and already had it? And again, I wouldn't call it a fanny pack, but rather a "cod piece pack," as it's part of the whole package... like what I did there? Also am I burying the lead on the futuristic golf carts in this shot? I can't say what I would do if I survived the nuclear holocaust, but getting around via golf cart doesn't seem like the worst idea. Something to keep in mind at least, God forbid I ever find myself in that situation.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Prime is probably the way to go. You'll see this listed both as Warriors of the Wasteland and New Barbarians--sometimes within the same streaming service! This is a fun time, and worth checking out, though the main character's prerequisite torture scene involving rape may make it tough for some audiences.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084424

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

Cop Target (1990)

Back in May of 2021 I had the guys from Comeuppance Reviews on to discuss our top 5 Ginty films, and this was one I watched for it. It was on YouTube at that time, and now it looks like even that's not a possibility. In terms of other reviews, none of our friends of the site have covered this, but it is on Will from Exploding Helicopter's Films with Exploding Helicopters list on Letterboxd--which if you haven't checked out, you should!

Cop Target features our man Ginty as a maverick Miami cop on the edge, maybe Crockett style, though instead of having an alligator for a pet, he has a cat which is fed through a robotic feeder while he's away on cop business. And he's away on business now, to the fictitious island of San Cristobal, where he's escorting the widow (Barbara Bingham) and daughter of a DEA agent so they can accept an award on his behalf. As always, things aren't what they seem, and the daughter's kidnapped and held for ransom, and as always, Ginty's not supposed to continue on the case, but as always, a maverick cop on the edge doesn't follow the rules. He's going to get to the bottom of this no matter what it takes.

This is the fun 80s/90s Italian-directed actioner you came for. It has its moments, like that cat feeder, or Ginty ordering olive oil from room service so he can clean his gun with it; and beyond the Ginty fun, we also have Charles "Napes" Napier as his boss, which is always great to see. By the same token, it's not overly remarkable, it's more like one of those for completists, whether you're a self-styled "DTV connoisseur" like myself, or on a quest to watch every film with an exploding helicopter like Will, or like our friends at Comeuppance or Explosive Action who just want all of these kinds of movies, it's kind of more for someone of that ilk than a casual "I'm looking for a Saturday night time killer." If it were suddenly more available on sites like Tubi or Amazon Prime, I think I'd change that stance, because it is a fun low-budget gem, and maybe this gets to a bigger point about how we need more Ginty available to us overall, but as it stands, I don't know if this is worth the trouble it'll take to track it down if you're not an extreme completist.

We're now at six Ginty flicks on the site, which is still way off the pace of what we'd want, and considering I still have some that I watched for that pod episode in May of 2021, I have a lot of catching up to do--and honestly, I don't know how good I've been at doing it, because this is only the third Ginty film I've reviewed this year, and I think I have at least 4 left of the ones I watched back in May of 2021 for that podcast that I haven't reviewed yet! The thing is, this is everything you want in a low-budget Italian Ginty flick: he's equal parts charming and gruff, does a great job playing the Crockett like character director Umberto Lenzi wanted but giving it his own spin, and is just an all-around fun lead. It's a shame this isn't more readily available, because I think if someone were getting into Ginty, this would be a good one after the first two Exterminators and White Fire for someone's next film of his.

We last saw Napes earlier this year in Frogtown II, which was fun to see him in, but this was definitely more the Napes we look for: angry, behind a desk, telling Ginty he needs to cool it; then wearing tuxes to balls, eating at fancy restaurants, and putting his sport coat and a satchel of drug money in the trunk of his car. Look at that screen we got of him, complete with the Bush 41 picture on the wall, letting us know he's a government worker. It's pure Napes, he came to this movie to get shit done, and that's why we love him in stuff like this. He's one that I feel like should've been on the site more than the now 11 times he has, but when I look at his bio, he isn't in as many movies with the big names that we often spotlight on here as you'd think. For actors, our top five are Dolph, Daniels, Rothrock, Wilson, and Seagal, and he hasn't done a lot with any of them. I think as we start filling out some other filmographies though, like Ginty's, Williamson's, and even say a Z'Dar's, we'll probably start seeing more Napes as well. And who doesn't love seeing more Napes?

I thought maybe we'd done some other Umberto Lenzi films here on the site (or Humphrey Humbert as he's credited as here in the States), but this is the first, and when I looked at his filmography, I realized that he hasn't done much in the video age--and what he has done is mostly horror, which we don't do as much of here at the DTVC, so that probably explains why this is only his first. It's kind of too bad, because he goes into his giallo roots for a lot of the action and mystery here to give us something more fun than simply a Miami Vice Narco-thriller rip-off. That's something I've talked about on previous posts about films directed by Italian auteurs, they bring a unique element to the proceedings that we often don't get in modern DTV with the way line producers and distributors have so much say in how the film is made in order to get the most bang for the buck; but also, these Italian directors come from a school of filmmaking that means even if we gave modern DTV directors the same leeway we probably wouldn't get results like this. It's a piece of the late 80s/early 90s DTV puzzle that will always keep that era at the top for me, and hopefully more movies like this will be available to us more easily, so more people can enjoy something like this. Severin Films has been releasing DVDs of giallo directors like Lenzi, so maybe it's just a matter of time before they release Cop Target too.

Finally, I want to go back to the Miami Vice influence on this film. While the show would've been done for a year or two before this was made, so much of what people think of the 80s came from the colors, styles, and mood of that show. I had Jon Cross from the After Movie Diner and Miscellaneous Plumbing Fixtures on a recent podcast episode (Rage and Honor 1 and 2 in the archives), and we talked about that, how the 80s were actually drab, with a lot of browns, and not all those showy neon and pastel colors. What I think Lenzi does here is splits the difference, giving us some of the Miami Vice esthetic, but also working in the darker giallo tones that he was more comfortable in, which gives this movie an interesting feel. It's like what I was saying above about the Italian directors overall, they almost do "covers" of movies as opposed to rip-offs, whether it's this, Stelvio Massi with Black Cobra, or Bruno Mattei with Cruel Jaws or Robowar. This is a tradition that goes back further than that though, like with all the Star Wars rip-offs--or "covers"--from the 70s that we see on Tubi now. What also made the "cover" work so well here in Cop Target though was Ginty, because he's no Don Johnson or Crockett, he's 100% Pure Ginty, the same way that Williamson was 100% Pure Williamson in Black Cobra.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As far as I can see, at least in the US, this isn't available right now, but maybe a brave soul will re-upload it on YouTube. I would say this isn't worth going too far out of your way for, but if you stumble upon it, it's a lot of fun.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099302

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

1990: I guerrieri del Bronx aka 1990 Bronx Warriors (1982)

This is a straight up classic. I didn't do the work I should've and looked to see if this was on Netflix sooner. I think it just got lost in the shuffle. Anyway, I got my act together, and here it is. One other note, the DVD I got from the Netflix shipping facility in Portland was almost untouched. No one's renting this gem.

1990: Bronx Warriors takes place in, you guessed it, 1990. The Bronx has been so overrun by gang violence that the city gives up and lets the gangs have it. That's until a rich girl's gone too far and run there to escape her inheritance of a major arms corporation. She won't rely on the old man's money, but it's a bitch girl, when the corporation sends former Bronx gang member now cop Vic Morrow in to get her. High and dry, out of the rain, it's so easy to hurt others when you can't feel pain, but she'll feel the pain too as the rival gangs choose sides and fight it out while the cops come in and try to take them all down.



This is pretty sweet. I mean, it's a classic, so what can you expect. Obviously, it's 2009, and the Bronx didn't devolve into the mess it is in this movie. The director couldn't have guessed Rudy Juliani would come in and do what he did with his aggressive policing and whatnot. This is a vision of New york City that could never imagine a Times Square that wasn't full of hookers and sex shops; never imagine Forrest Gump's Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant where the peep shows once were. Sure, it's silly at points, and you're talking about the idea that the Bronx is given up by the city, so you have to suspend belief some; but this is a really fun time that shouldn't be missed.

The biggest name here for DTVC readers is Fred Williamson. He plays The Ogre, a rival gang leader to the hero, Trash. 1982 was peak Fred Williamson, just as the wave was cresting from his great Blacksploitation films of the 70s. The only drawback, if there's any for me, it's that he's not in this as much as he should be. I looked him up on imdb, and he's listed as being 71 years old. Wow. He graduated high school in 1955. Insane. I mean, I guess if he was playing in Super Bowl I, he has to be getting up there. I just can't believe I didn't see that sooner, considering all the times I've looked him up on imdb. Maybe I just didn't want to know...



This was Vic Morrow's second to last movie, the last being his part in a segment of The Twighlight Zone Movie. He actually died tragically while filming that movie when a helicopter crashed on him and two young children. He was great here as a bad guy, but reading his imdb bio, he actually hated the fact that he was type-cast as the "tough" after his debut in the film Blackboard Jungle. Maybe it's the Bronx accent that directors liked-- he just sounded like a "tough".

I grew up near Boston, MA, another city that went through a fair amount of urban renewal in the late 90s early 2000s. In some areas, especially Jamaica Plain, the changes were really good. It's funny to say I'm going to Jamaica Plain to older people, because they're always like "good luck". Anyway, I was watching Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, and he covered New York City, and he was disgusted at the changes the city had undergone in the last twenty years or so. He felt like it took away some of the city's character. I understood what he was saying, but I never really felt it until I saw this. It makes me wish I'd seen Times Square in the 80s now.



This is the real deal. Go for it. It's a must watch. Sure, it's funny, but it's not that bad either. The fact that the copy up here from Netflix was barely touched shows that not enough people are seeing this gem, and I hope in a small way my review will get the word out on it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085124/