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

Batman (1966)

People often ask me what my favorite comic book movie of all time is, and when I say it's this film, they think I'm either kidding or being different for the sake of being different. I think a big part of it is that my generation has this idea that the 60s were either Andy Griffith or protests, and so to them a show like the Adam West Batman couldn't have been purposefully silly, but rather just a product of "awe-shucks" wholesome family entertainment. It's like watching The Match Game and focusing on them saying "Whoopee" for "sex", instead of celebrating how funny and sexually charged the show really was. If you think "Bam!" "Pow!" and "Zoink!" were serious, then of course you wouldn't get why I love this so much. 

Batman was originally supposed to be a feature film to sell the TV show, but when the TV show aired and was extremely successful, they waited on the movie, then shot it between the first two seasons. The film brings back all of the original cast, except for Julie Newmar, who was replaced by Lee Meriwether for the role of Catwoman. In addition to her, the memorable Adam West, Burt Ward, Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, and Burgess Meredith all take on the roles they made famous and iconic.

I just watched this again last night, and it's still as good today as it was when I first saw it on a Sunday afternoon on WBSK TV 38's Movie Loft with Dana Hersey when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. Sure, it's not for everyone, and I don't begrudge a person who goes in for the darker interpretations on-screen today, but to write this one off for being satirical and tongue-and-cheek is as bad as me writing off The Dark Knight for having a Saw villain (played amazingly by Heath Ledger, but a Saw villain no less) as its Joker. The 1966 Batman was not cheesy, it was funny, and it was funny on purpose. I'd say it's ahead of its time, but it was hugely popular when it was aired, so maybe, the correct statement is, us Gen Xers and Gen Yers could probably take page out of our Baby Boomer parents' playbook. If anything, Black Dynamite did. (As an aside, I was born in 1979, so I'm on the cusp of the Gen X Gen Y generations, but I think I'm more Gen X.)

One thing I really liked about this was all the colors. No, it was no Ran, but what is? It just seemed like every set, every outfit, every prop just popped off the screen. Again, a stark contrast to not only the new Batman films, but also even the comic and video games we see today. Tim Burton's Batman did so much to change the landscape, and even the new one that made so much money and is trying so hard to be its own thing is housed fully under Burton's shadow. The thing is, as far as I can tell, Batman is stuck between these two worlds. You can only either be the campy, satirical Adam West Batman of the 60s, or you can be the dark Tim Burton Batman of the 90s. Burton's Batman was such a backlash against the 60s version, but it was so good, the fear is any step back into light and color for Batman is a step back to the 60s version, and it's almost impossible to duplicate that and have it work, so people stay in the dark world. I'd like to see someone pull Batman back into the middle, but I don't see it happening.

I don't know which way the third in this new Batman series will go for a villain, but they have a lot to live up to with the previous versions, and I'm not sure they'll be lucky enough to have another Heath Ledger performance to save them if they do another ill conceived version of another one of our favorites. Let's be real here, all The Dark Knight's Joker did was give people Bloody Smiles. Ledger took that pedestrian material and turned it into an Oscar (though really, the Oscar he should've won was for Brokeback Mountain). Yes, I agree that the last thing The Dark Knight wanted was a Cesar Romero with his mustache still visible under the white paint, but if we're honest, Jack Nicholson's Joker was just as amazing, and was much better written. What made Romero and Nicholson's Jokers better was how they enhanced great material (on extreme opposite ends of the spectrum), while Ledger turned something unremarkable into a reason to go see a pretty blah blockbuster that we've all seen myriad times before. Ledger should get all the credit for that, but the writers of The Dark Knight should not be let off the hook, let alone applauded.

Adam West is the man. The only star I think of who fit his role better was Christopher Reeve as Superman. If you watch this DVD with his and Burt Ward's commentary, you can really see how he not only gets it, but he even adds his own touches to the silliness around him. He's not a Shatner, who probably isn't as in on the joke as he thinks he is; Adam West started the joke--it's his joke! But at the same time, he, more than any of the people associated with the show and movie, created an icon. While Nicholson, and then Ledger, may have stepped out from under the shadow of Cesar Romero, not one of the four men to play the Caped Crusader since West has been able to fill his shoes--er boots... and tights.

Finally, this one scene above has always stuck out for me as quintessential Catwoman. It's very sexy how she's lying with the heel of her boot resting on that post; but it's also very commandeering, especially how she doesn't move at all as the other villains come in and out, sometimes even going under her legs. It's so feminine, yet at the same time, it's not at all submissive: this is her space, she doesn't care if it's taking up your space, and she knows full well that no guy is going to ask her to give that space up. This is what I was talking about when I reviewed Catwoman and I was discussing how wrong that film's approach was. Lee Meriwether perfectly married the seductive and the deadly elements we expect from Catwoman, and no scene in this film encapsulates that better than this one here. She deserved that part on Barnaby Jones she got from doing so well here.

If you haven't seen this, or even worse, wrote off the old TV show, it's worth another look. Allow yourself to laugh with a foam shark attached to Batman as he punches it while waiting with bated breath for Robin to bring him the Bat Shark Repellent. It's not cheesy, it's comedy--no one was off camera or in the editing room after saying "how exciting will this scene be? I can't wait!" They were laughing their asses off, and so should you.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060153/

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Bloodmoon (1997)

I had this movie buried in my Netflix queue for who knows how long. After I put up No Tomorrow, one of my readers, elementarybeatboxoperator (listed in the Followers section of the blog), mentioned this and White Tiger as two great Daniels films. I went to Amazon for them, and saw them on VHS, and figured that was how I'd get them. Then for whatever reason I was looking up other Daniels movies on Netflix, and saw that they not only had both films, but that I'd also already added them to my queue. To give you an idea, my queue is 267 movies long. Maybe I should do something about that.

Bloodmoon has a serial killer in NYC killing people who are good at fighting. A dude pretending to be Eddie Murphy is on the case, but his boss, Frank Gorshin, thinks he should call in serial killer expert Gary Daniels. Luckily for everyone involved, Daniels is more of a martial arts expert than serial killer expert, because A: it takes him forever to track the killer, leaving more time to kick people's asses; and B: we'd have a horrible ending if Daniels couldn't fight the baddie.



This is pretty sweet. The fighting is actually pretty good. That's the serious critique. Beyond that, this thing plays out like a Troma film, from the close-ups, to the gross fat guy of a computer nerd, to the Willmington, DE that looks more like the Hoboken Troma usually uses for their NYC. There were scenes where Daniels and his wannabe Eddie Murphy would flip over things to get to their destination, and I'd be like "why would you do that?" Then there's the bad guy's costume. I probably should've gotten an image of it, but I forgot. This is a great mix of silliness and solid martial arts work. Not a bad deal.

I've always loved Gary Daniels, and I don't know why it's taken me so long to get more of his films up here. Maybe I was too busy focusing on Seagal and Lundgren films. Whatever the reason, Daniels is a force from off the chain, and he needs more recognition. Call this the Summer of Daniels, as I try to remedy the dearth of posts of movies with him in them. One film I need to get my hands on is Heatseeker, which was directed by Albert Pyun. I see it on Amazon for like $3 (which is $6 after shipping), which is probably my best bet. I wish there was a Netflix that specialized in VHS movies so I wouldn't have to by crappy used copies of all the films I want that aren't on DVD yet.



I kind of liked the Eddie Murphy wannabe in this. He did a pretty solid impression. He was almost a dead on Axel Foley. According to imdb, there's talk of a fourth Beverly Hills Cop. I kind of like that, if they don't decide to make it absurd like the fourth Die Hard. I was surprised to find out that Eddie Murphy is not only an Aries, being born on April 3, 1961, but that he's ten years younger than Steven Seagal. It's just hard to imagine that Seagal will be sixty soon. Is imdb right? Was Seagal really born in 1951?

The baddie was played by a dude named Darren Shahlavi. He was a pretty solid fighter, and he's been in a fair amount of stuff, including I Spy. I wonder if early in his career, when he made this movie, he said "Someday I'll be big enough to act in a movie with the real Eddie Murphy", and then 5 years later, when he was on the I Spy set, he was on screen with Eddie Murphy, and he took a moment to take it all in and thought "I really made it." I say good for you, Darren Shahlavi.



Almost two months ago I did a Miles O'Keefe film called Moving Target and forgot it had Burt Ward in it, partially because I didn't recognize him. I made sure I wouldn't make that mistake again, so when this movie had Frank Gorshin, I was all over it. I think the old Batman TV series is my all time favorite show. I know everyone liked that new Dark Knight thing, and Jack was good as the Joker in Batman, but nothing can really get down to the essence of what Batman was all about like the TV show from the 60s. Where was Cesar Romero's Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1966 for that Batman movie, huh? (Oh yeah, I'm sure this is getting old, but Frank Gorshin is another Aries, born April 5, 1933-- only five years before Bolo Yeung!)

Bloodmoon is a definite. Great martial arts action, coupled with so much silliness you and your friends will have no trouble making fun of it. Throw this on your Netflix queue and have your buddies over for a bad movie night.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118745/