Active Stealth (1999)

Recently Will from Exploding Helicopter posted the exploding helicopter from this film on his Bluesky, and when I looked it up, I thought "how have I not covered this before?" It looks like something I should've done on the site 15 years ago, but somehow slipped through the cracks. In addition to us and Will, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Steve Q at Down Among the Z Movies, and Kenner at Movies in the Attic have covered this as well.

Active Stealth has Daniel Baldwin as a special forces kind of guy who thought his buddy was killed in a mission, only to find he's being held hostage by the drug cartel guy they tried to take down some time ago. Their commanding officer, Fred Williamson, sends Baldwin and his team (including Fred Olen Ray mainstays Tim Abell and Chick Vennera) down to get their friend out, and has them use a plane with the latest in active stealth technology as the means to get there. That's it, in and out, and the film is done in a cool 37 minutes--or is it? It's never that easy, and now it's a matter of who will make it with Baldwin back home to see their families, and who will have a dramatic death scene?

This is your classic IMDb 3.5 star rating complete with user reviews touting it as "the worst movie of all time," but for me who's been doing this for almost 1400 movies plus however many more on the podcast, I see something that's professionally made with a few fun moments. What does that mean for you though, because it may not be anywhere near the worst movie ever or as bad as 3.5 stars on IMDb, but is it worth the 100 minutes the movie's asking of you when you have so many options out there? Here are a few things that I would point to that may help you decide. First, Ray and company have a lot of fun touches that harken back to old post-WWII movies, the best of which might be Chick Vennera, who plays the Italian American stereotype so many of those movies had, and caps off his performance with a too sweet helicopter explosion. Or maybe it's the inclusion of another Fred, Fred Williamson, who doesn't do much beyond talk on the phone, but looks great doing it. Then there's Andrew Stevens, who's just there to wear a mustache and talk in military speak, but looks great doing it too. Or finally, Tim Abell, who's there to be the Southern stereotype to Chick Vennera's Italian American stereotype, and again, looks great doing it. The story meanders a bit, and has the holes in it you'd expect from something that was pumped out more because they had the sets available and could do it quick and on the cheap than anything, and I don't know that those touches above is enough to recommend it, but it had its moments for sure. Also, it'll up your percentage on Will's Films with Exploding Helicopters list on Letterboxd.

We're now at 17 directed movies for Fred Olen Ray, depending on whether or not you count Dinosaur Island as 1 or .5, and I count it as 1, but because of that I give the edge in ranking to Joseph Merhi, who's tied with him at 17 for second all-time after Albert Pyun's 44. This is classic Fred Olen Ray, the studio or whoever wanted a quick and dirty military movie that they could throw on video store shelves or cable channels could use for easy programming, he had the location and called a bunch of people he'd worked with before, and along with some bigger names to add to the tin, they made it happen. He's made a career of getting things done like this, across all genres, and here we have something that works more for our audience than Christmas in Palm Springs or Christmas in Vermont, but even with those his process is the same, he's good at pumping them out on the cheap. If we cut out the Christmas movies and the Lifetime movies, he still has enough actioners and Erotic Thrillers remaining to catch Pyun for most all time, it's more a matter of whether or not we'll be doing the site long enough. Next year we'll hit twenty years, so we'll know by 2047 if I kept things going and Ray finally caught him.

There were two other Hall of Famers in this, Fred Williamson and Cole S. McKay. For Williamson, this was a unique one, in that his character was captured at the beginning, and he's not the hero, or even portrayed as a badass who could be the hero. It really is his name and how cool he looks holding a phone, which I think works in a film like this. He's sitting at 33 films on the site, and looking at his bio, I'm not sure how many more we'll do in the near future. He has a couple he's directed that we still need to do, but it might be more things like this where there are other names involved, and he's more along for the ride, but it's possible that will be enough to get him into the 40 Club at some point. Speaking of DTVC clubs, Cole S. McKay is now at 69 (hey-oh!) films on the site. Our next PM film is going to be The Power Within, which will be the one that gets Art Camacho into the 60 Club, and which also has McKay on stunts, so that'll be his 70th film, but I think he needs something more prodigious for his 70 Club post, so one idea I had was Star Hunter, which he co-directed with Fred Olen Ray. It's possible in the meantime I'll review another movie he did stunts because he has so many of them!

Rounding out the rest of the cast and crew, we have a lot of names to get through. I guess we should start with the film's star, Daniel Baldwin, who felt a bit out of place with all of the Ray mainstays around him, but he's a Baldwin, so the name on the tin means more than whether he fits or not. DTVC favorite Tim Abell is back with his 16th film on the site. Is it possible he's putting together a Hall of Fame resume? Speaking of which, Andrew Stevens will be getting inducted this fall, as this is his 36th film overall between acting, directing, and producing, and I believe his 11th as an actor. Speaking of Erotic Thrillers, Shannon Whirry plays Baldwin's wife. I had never really looked at it before, but a few years before this it looks like she'd stopped doing Erotic Thrillers and was doing more stuff like this, or mainstream TV roles, which I think is okay, considering how many great Erotic Thrillers she made before this. Jim Wynorski was a producer on this, under the name "Noble Henry." When talking about great DTV directors, he's one that probably should have more on the site, but at least he gets another tag here. Finally, wrestling fans will appreciate Terry Funk, who was great as the baddie's righthand man. We've actually seen him two other times on the site, with Road House and Timestalkers. 

Finally, as we're talking about Fred Olen Ray and the DTVC director's tag list, I thought about a picture someone posted on Bluesky of Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg. In the comments another person asked has anyone had worked with all five of them, and the best me or anyone else could come up with was Tom Cruise, who's worked with all of them but George Lucas. That got me thinking about who a similar five would be for DTV directors. Definitely Albert Pyun, Fred Olen Ray, and Joseph Merhi, who I mentioned above. From there I think Sam Firstenberg has to be included too, so then it's a matter of who the fifth one is. I was between Jim Wynorski and Charles Band, but maybe we add both, and it could be like adding Jonathan Demme or Oliver Stone to that other five (and if we do Stone, that five out of six for Cruise). If that's our six, do we have a DTV Tom Cruise who's worked with four or five of them? I was having trouble finding someone who had worked with five, but Tim Thomerson has worked with all but Merhi and Firstenberg, and Dudikoff and Ice-T have worked with all but Merhi and Band--though Merhi produced an episode of LA Heat Ice-T did. I would not have thought Merhi would be the sticking point in a lot of these, because so many people did PM films, but it looks like the case. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Tubi here in the States. I don't know that it's something to seek out, but if you like the names involved, it might do in a pinch. Also, if you're like me and need to get your percentage up on Will's Films with an Exploding Helicopter list on Letterboxd, this will help there too.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0211901

Judgement Day (1999)

I was looking to get more Ice-T on the site, and I saw that this was on Tubi. In addition to him, it has Mario Van Peebles, was written by Fred Olen Ray, Cole S. McKay was stunt coordinator, and has stars from two of my favorite shows, Barney Miller and Beverly Hills, 90210. In that sense, it was less about whether I should review it, and more about why I hadn't done it already! In addition to us, Matt Spector at Bulletproof has covered this as well.

Judgement Day is about an asteroid that's heading for earth in three days. Higher-ups Max Gail and James Eckhouse want to use a device developed by Linden Ashby to intercept and destroy it, the problem is, Mario Van Peebles and his religious cult have kidnapped Ashby because they don't want the asteroid stopped. Gail thinks he has a leak in his department, so he gets FBI agent Suzy Amis to track Ashby down, but she can't do it alone, so she gets Ice-T out of prison, because he has a score to settle with Van Peebles himself. It's a race against time now, will it be relief accompanied by smiles and hardy handshakes in the war room, or doom and destruction?

You can probably guess the outcome, and to be fair, who wants to be deprived of those smiles of relief and hardy handshakes after the planet's been saved? Especially knowing Wojo and Jim Walsh are in the war room hoping Linden Ashby's device works. On the way there, there's almost a 48 Hours interplay between Amis and Ice-T as they track down Van Peeble's base of operations, which is a nice twist on the disaster movie that I'm surprised The Asylum hasn't used more often. That said, the Fred Olen Ray story has that feel of a few story templates fused together, and it might not have worked, except for the prodigious cast I listed above. For example, in addition to Van Peebles, Tom "Tiny" Lister is his right hand man. A rival drug dealer Ice-T and Amis go to for info is played by Coolio. Amis's boyfriend is Larry Poindexter--and no, unfortunately he doesn't drive a car while blasting Guns N' Roses' "Move to the City." Once you have all these names, it's just a matter of getting in and out in 90 minutes, having a few good action moments spread throughout, and then letting those names cook, and I feel like this one does all that.

We're at 19 movies now for Ice-T, and I think this might be my favorite of his performances. Also his screen time in this is probably more than four or five of the other movies of his we've covered combined, which was refreshing too. He's in the Hall of Fame for a reason, and this reinforces that. The moment he's onscreen, you know it's going to be good, but then there's the mix of hard edge and off-beat and quirky that allows him to thrive in the 48 Hours paradigm. The other thing about Ice-T is he was a rapper first, and this movie uses one of his songs, which is also fantastic. I don't know if between rights issues or studio time if he recorded a fresh track that it's realistic to expect every Ice-T movie to have his music in it, but it would be nice if more of them did, because it was a great touch here. We haven't done one of his films in two years, so I need to rectify that and get more of his stuff up more frequently, because he's always a great time.

I'm going to try not to go too fast and furious (Vin Diesel style) as I get through the other names in this, but there's a lot, so buckle up. First, among Hall of Famers, we have Cole S. McKay as stunt coordinator, plus he's in one scene which you can see above. We're at 65 for him now, and I have at least one other movie of his in the can that I need to review, so he'll be up to 66 soon enough. Then we have Fred Olen Ray as screenwriter. I think this is the fifth movie of his we've done that he wrote, but because he didn't direct this doesn't add to that total for him, which I think stands at 17, second-most all time among directors. Mario Van Peebles is great as the baddie, he gives you everything you want there, and is a name we always enjoy seeing on the site. Same for the late Tom "Tiny" Lister, who plays Van Peebles's righthand man, and gives you everything you want in that role. Then we have Linden Ashby, someone we've seen a few times and probably should be tagged. His part's not as big, but it's vital, so it was good they cast someone like him in the role. I mentioned Larry Poindexter. He probably gets it the worst in this, but that's okay, he'll always have American Ninja 2. Then as a big Barney Miller fan, how do you not love Wojo? We've seen him here before too, in particular DC Cab comes to mind, but here he's great as higher up tasked with stopping the asteroid. Fans of Firestorm (not sure if there are any of those out there) would know Suzy Amis, who ended up marrying James Cameron after this and hasn't done another movie since. If you're going to go out, why not have it be an Ice-T DTV flick written by Fred Olen Ray and directed by John Terlesky. That's right, Deathstalker II and Chopping Mall's John Terlesky directed this, as he did another Van Peebles/Ice-T film we did a couple years ago, Guardian. Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the late Coolio in a one-scene cameo. I don't know how many movies aren't improved by a Coolio one-scene cameo, and this film certainly wasn't an exception.

One name you may have noticed that's missing above is James Eckhouse, aka Jim Walsh from Beverly Hills, 90210. I wanted to give him his own paragraph, because I think he's one of the best TV dads of all time, but he never gets included on that list. Maybe that's because he was a little young to be playing a father to kids born in the early 70s, considering he was only born in 1955, but I always loved how he and Carol Potter's Cindy Walsh were the two grounding forces on the show. That might be why the show wrote them out eventually, because I think they wanted to untether the kids somewhat and let them find their way without the Walshes there to provide stability. Who knows what the reason was, but I'd take the Pepsi Challenge with James Eckhouse's Jim Walsh against any other TV dad out there, other than maybe Hugh Beaumont's Ward Cleaver and Robert Reed's Mike Brady. So, here's to you James Eckhouse, you're one of the great ones.

Finally, we get two common movie lines in this. The first one is so common Will at Exploding Helicopter has a Letterboxd list for movies that feature it, and that's "we've got company," which we get when Tom "Tiny" Lister is trying to drive off with Van Peebles, his wife (Shireen Crutchfield), and their bounty, Linden Ashby, when Lister notices the cops are coming and gives us the line. The second one was "it's the 90s." Anyone who lived through the 90s knows what this means, anything that was considered outside the bounds of conservative, buttoned-up, Reagan 80s culture was now given a grudging acceptance with those three little words, "it's the 90s." Women standing up for themselves? "Hey, it's the 90s, am I right?" Gay people demanding more rights? "I mean, to each their own, it's the 90s after all." Sinead O'Connor ripping up a picture of the Pope? "Okay, let's not get carried away..." Here it's within an off-beat, quirky, and slightly homophobic back and forth between Ice-T and Suzy Amis that we get the line, when Ice-T asks why she's not married, then asks if she's a lesbian, to which he explains he doesn't have a problem with it if she is, because "it's the 90s." Maybe we need a little bit more "it's the 90s" in our society today, because, man "it's the 2020s" covers a whole host of bonkersness that I don't even want to start on.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Tubi here in the States, which I think is a great deal. The names alone sell it, but in a sea of thumbnails on a streaming services, sometimes that's all you need. Hell, it's the 2020s, am I right?

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0221309

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

We Kill for Love (2023)

It's the weekend after Christmas, and continuing a tradition I've done since I've come back from hiatus in 2019, we're doing another documentary, this time one that Jon Cross from the PM Entertainment Podcast and the After Movie Diner recommended to us. He and I have been doing a series of Erotic Thrillers on the podcast for the past year or so too, so you can check those out as well over in our podcast archives.

We Kill for Love is a documentary that looks at the rise, reign, and fall of the Erotic Thriller during the 80s and 90s. It examines the mix of genres and inspirations that the films draw from, and the unique cultural environment that gave them birth. We also get some great interviews from people like Fred Olen Ray, Monique Parent, and Andrew Stevens. As time goes on though, the forces that gave us this unique cinematic moment serve to be its undoing, and as the 90s become the 2000s, the market starts to dry up. As our documentarians sift through the VHS detritus of what once was, they and their subjects try to make sense of it all. But is there a sense of it all to make? Does a femme fatale with a handgun in her stocking-top ever go out of style?

Overall I enjoyed this, but it does clock in at two hours and 45 minutes, so you're in for long ride. I'm okay with that though. Yes, it's long for a documentary, but too short for a mini-series, so probably from a streaming algorithm standpoint--and maybe a modern attention span standpoint too, it doesn't quite fit, but I almost feel like that makes it all the better, like the subject matter it's covering, it's not of this time either. The biggest thing is the director, Anthony Penta, pulls footage from so many of these movies, that you feel like you're in the 90s discovering them on cable all over again. And then the interviews are fantastic, with all the actors, directors, producers, and film scholars and film writers telling us how these were made, what they were about, and what kinds of messages were below the surface. As someone who was born in 1979, and grew up in the 90s, there wasn't a sense for me that there was a world before these films, they just always existed, but now 25-30 years later, to see the birth, growth, and unfortunately death and postmortem of something that had such a huge impact on my love of film, especially direct-to-video movies, was a lot of fun, and I think worth checking out--one of the few times I'll recommend something with such a long runtime!

When we started the site, I expected to do more Erotic Thrillers, and while the site moved more toward action movies because those films got the most engagement, that was in comparison to horror, comedy, and sci-fi. Erotic Thrillers on the other hand were the only genre that got the hits on the site that action did, the problem was, in the late 2000s, those movies were harder to find. A lot of them didn't make it to DVD, which was where I got most of the movies we reviewed in those early days; but many weren't even on home VHS release, they were only sold to video rental stores and cable movie outlets. Even on YouTube it was hard to get them, because the adult content would cause them to get taken down. It looks like some of them are making it to Tubi and other free streamers, but with those it's dicey because they can get taken down just as quick. So it's still an uphill battle, but there are ways to get these, so I'm going to do my best to get more of them up on the site, because as this film documents, they're a large part of the DTV legacy.

As I mentioned above, the interviews were great. One of my favorites was Monique Parent talking about how much she was working in the 90s, and how all the movies ran together for her. She gives us an unabashed slice of what that world was like in a way that puts you back there in it. From a Hall of Famer standpoint, we had Fred Olen Ray, who ran the gamut on movies he made in the 90s, but Erotic Thrillers were a big part of that. Between him and Jim Wynorski, they talked about why they needed to use aliases, because distributors were like "we already have enough of their movies!", and Wynorski joked that people on IMDb have found most of his films made under an alias, but there are still a few out there that people haven't found yet. Another big name that was interviewed was Andrew Stevens, and not only did he discuss the Night Eyes series, but also how he moved from actor to producer, and the part Night Eyes played in that. I've finally tagged him for all his producer credits on the site, and this makes film 33, so we'll be putting him in the Hall of Fame next October. Finally, speaking of tags, my rule for documentaries has been if someone was interviewed I'll tag them, but not if it's just footage of one of their films. I'm making an exception to that here for Julie Strain, who gets her own tribute segment in the middle of the movie, which was really nice to see. Here's to you Ms. Strain, you were one of the best to ever do it, you've truly been missed.

We've talked a lot both on the site and the podcast about Blockbuster's role in running the Mom and Pop video stores out of business, and then themselves dying off when Netflix came on the scene, because they had no brand loyalty. This movie gets into some other ways Blockbuster had a negative effect on the DTV industry as the 90s went into the 2000s, but also some other ways that their business model led to their own undoing. The first thing they mentioned was how in the early days of Blockbuster, DTV distributors loved them because they could negotiate big one-off deals of like 20,000 copies, as opposed to getting thousands of individual Mom and Pops to order the movie on their own out of a catalog. It meant in one purchase order from Blockbuster they could get their budget back and then some. The problem was, when the major studios got in on the home video market, both for DTV films and their major releases, the indie distributors got frozen out. This led to something though that I didn't consider. Part of the Mom and Pop business model was only having a couple copies of a new release, that way you'd rent something else if you came in and found the one you wanted wasn't there. With Blockbuster having dozens of a new release, it meant everyone got the movie they wanted, which meant they weren't renting as many movies overall as they did during the Mom and Pop era. The other thing was the cheap DVD market that comes in the early 2000s. Suddenly movies you could only get on VHS, or worse, by taping off cable, were now available for $5 in the bargain bin at Walmart; or those low-budget 10 movies for $10 sets, my friends and I would get one of those and watch three or four over a weekend, and got a better deal out of it than renting that many movies. All of these things led to the collapse of the video market, and took Erotic Thrillers down with them. They tried to pivot in the early 2000s to a more soft-core porn approach, but by the mid-2000s porn was so available for free on the internet that it no longer had any market either.

Finally, speaking of porn, this tackles the subject of exactly what is porn, what that means if an actor is working in porn, and do Erotic Thrillers count. I think the first thing is the double-standard between women working in front of the camera, versus directors working behind the camera. Fred Olen Ray can make two or three Erotic Thrillers a year in the 90s with all kinds of sex in them, and still be able to make Hallmark Christmas movies today, while an actor who took their top off in dozens of sexually charged thrillers may not be afforded that same luxury. And I think there's some of that under the surface when some of the actors who were interviewed insist "I never did porn" the way a guy in the 90s would've said "I'm not gay," as if there's anything wrong with either. I think for my age cohort though, which was 10-20 years younger than the actors in these films, we grew up with them, and as such, we might have been the first mini-generation to look at this stuff differently, and not immediately think someone working in the adult film industry should be shunned, let alone if someone got naked in an Erotic Thriller. From there you get younger Millennials and Gen Z who say you shouldn't judge a sex worker, full stop. In the 80s and 90s there was this Conservative brand of feminism that was anti sex work, which this movie labels as left wing politically, but younger Millennial or Gen Z feminism would say isn't feminism at all, and I think for them, hearing the actors in this trying to distance themselves from the porn industry would be off-putting. In that sense, I hope more of these movies become available on streamers so younger Millennials and Gen Z can consume them, because I think they're a missing part of the story of how we get to the sex positivity of the 2010s. Another thread in the film is this idea that you couldn't make these films today in the world of sex positivity, but I disagree. These movies have a lot of strong women with a lot of sexual agency, if anything they were ahead of their time, and could fit in nicely in the modern environment.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As you can see from my long post, this movie packs a lot in, and I've only scratched the surface of it. While it's free to stream on Tubi you should check it out. The Erotic Thriller was a moment in cinematic time, and if you lived it, the nostalgia factor alone is worth it; but if you're younger and curious about this, this is a great starting place.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10404002

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Terminal Force (1989)

I was looking for something new to me to review on the site, after a spate of reviews on films that were either on our pod, or pods I'd guested on, and I saw this bad boy on Tubi. A non-ninja Richard Harrison sounded like a lot of fun, plus it was directed by Fred Olen Ray. Let's see how it did.

Terminal Force has Harrison as a disgraced cop on suspension after he killed a kid who pulled a toy gun on him. At the same time, mafia boss Johnny Ventura (John Henry Richardson) kidnaps the daughter of a guy who's going to testify against him, so Harrison's boss gets the crazy-Grinchey idea of having Harrison do it. Harrison needs to rehab his image, because he's on suspension he can work outside the rules of the force, and also because he's on suspension, he's expendable! It sounds like a win-win! He hooks up with a dancer that used to work for Ventura (Dawn Wildsmith) to try and track the girl down, but can he trust her? What about his friends on the force? Who can he trust? Beyond a bottle of Stoli, no one.

This is fantastic. It's not going to make any top ten lists or blow anyone away, but it's a solid 84 minutes of late 80s low-budget action, complete with shootings, explosions, and boobs. The opening two scenes involve a car going over a cliff, and our hero in that shot above shooting a would-be liquor store robber in front of a backdrop of 80s-era bags of chips and cans of soda. If Harrison's not going to wear a ninja costume, that's what I need. From there, it might be pretty paint-by-numbers, but it's a good paint-by-numbers, like a McDonald's cheeseburger that you put down after a long week at work, or on your way home from vacation when you're looking for something familiar. Sure, I know too well here in Philly that that cheeseburger can have a stale bun, or way too much ketchup, or get screwed up any number of other ways, which if we're extending this metaphor we can say the same about this kind of movie, it can also get screwed up any number of ways, but Ray, Harrison, and company pull it off, and we're left with the comforting cinematic equivalent of junk food, which is always fun.

This is now 17 films for Fred Olen Ray on the site, so he's close to joining Albert Pyun as the only two people with 20 or more director credits. He has a ton of stuff on places like Tubi, but I think it's his work in this late 80s/early 90s period that's my favorite. I read that the movie was shot in five days, and it's in and out in 84 minutes, but delivers everything you want in that window. Even with the padding and the plot exposition dialog, it comes off in a way that's a lot of fun that it works in spite of the fact that it goes against the rules of filmmaking. For example, in that opening scene where the car goes flying off a cliff, before that we have an old mafia boss and his lawyer talking, and while their conversation is all plot exposition, they sound hilarious--plus the boat of a Caddy they're sitting in with the covered headlights doesn't hurt--and then we get the fantastic payoff of the car going over the cliff. After that, it's an extended scene of Harrison going into a liquor store and the clerk giving him a hard time about limes. It's all padding, but it's also fun to watch Richard Harrison disheveled and arguing about limes. And then we get the payoff of the robbery. The money now is in Christmas movies and Lifetime thrillers, so that's what he makes, but when the money was in stuff like this, Ray was great at it, and this film is another example of that.

This is our third Richard Harrison film on the site, but his first non-ninja movie. He's really funny here, which works in Ray's offbeat style in a way I wasn't expecting--I mean I guess I shouldn't have based my opinion on him off of two Godfrey Ho ninja movies where he's not only been dubbed, but dubbed with new lines. It would've been nice if Harrison got to speak to someone on a Garfield phone, but the film could be forgiven for not giving us that gem. While this is only his third film, as we near October and our Hall of Fame inductions, he has to be a consideration. Sure, over a dozen of his films are ninja movies Godfrey Ho made without his permission, but he also made a ton of stuff like this that had nothing to do with ninjas, and he's a low-budget star who started before the video store and cable age, and bridged us into that from the grindhouse low-budget theater age. Truly one of the greats, and we see that more here than in his Godfrey Ho ninja movies.

We've gone over all the ways that these late 80s/early 90s DTV actioners are superior to their modern counterparts. Some things the modern movie can't help, like the nostalgia for the 80s soda cans and bags of chips, or the Cadillac boat with covers on the headlights. Often too, when movies try to go back in time they screw it up, so I'd rather they don't try to recreate the aesthetic. Some though they do have control over, like making sure the two actors having a plot exposition conversation are fun to listen to--though again, there was something of an "of the period" quality they had that gave them a nostalgia edge in this that a Texas Battle and a son of Wayne Gretzky couldn't pull off. But the biggest one might be John Henry Richardson. He was fantastic chewing the scenery as baddie Johnny Ventura. How hard is it to get him to be your mob boss baddie? I get that there are certain realities that make creating modern DTV flicks tougher than it was 35 years ago, but casting John Henry Richardson isn't one of them.

Finally, I'd like to use this penultimate paragraph to spotlight the late 80s doughy mullet guy. You see him there above, squinting through full cheeks, the kind of cheeks aging women today pay a lot of money for, but at that time, especially for a guy, they were seen as a negative. You also have the light amount of mulletude in the back, not a lot of party, maybe enough for a few people over on a Sunday to watch the Rams game with some cheese and crackers and light beers. Now you're probably asking, "Matt, what's the difference between this kind of guy, and the Pork Roast?" The Pork Roast is meatier, you buy him at the store by the pound and roast him in the oven over low heat with some root vegetables. The late 80s doughy mullet guy is softer, a bread loaf that doesn't have a firm crust. Millennials made sourdough bread out of him during the pandemic and posted the results on social media. Guys like Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorski were great at using these guys, they found them all over LA, on their way back from In-N-Out Burger with their dinner in a bag. "Hey, you wanna be in a movie?" "What do I have to do?" "Nothing, just stand there with a gun, we'll take care of the rest." "Sure, I got nothing else going on today!" Here's to you late 80s doughy mullet guy, you were one of the great ones.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing you can find this on Tubi and a bunch of other free streamers here in the States. If you've got 90s minutes burning a hole in your pocket, you could do a lot worse than this one. Maybe they don't make 'em like this anymore, but we can still stream them.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100764

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/

The Adventures of Taura: Prison Ship Star Slammer aka Star Slammer (1986)

Back in April I did a film called Galaxy Warriors for my indie review, and I watched this then as a means of comparison. Considering it was directed by DTVC Hall of Famer Fred Olen Ray, and has DTVC favorite Ross Hagen in it, I figured it needed a review as well.

Star Slammer has Sandy Brooke as Taura, a woman living on a planet somewhere in outer space, having a pretty nice life, until Ross Hagen and Dukey Flyswatter show up with some other baddies and cause trouble. They're there as representatives of a galactic empire, which means when Taura takes the henchmen out and burns Hagen's hand in the process, she's sent to a space prison run by a lesbian dominatrix, Warden Exene (Marya Gant), and her lackey Muffin (Dawn Wildsmith). She's tossed in a cell block with some rough characters, led by Mikey (Suzy Stokey), who give her a hard time at first, but after she saves Mikey's life from a large monster, they team up to take everyone out. At the same time Hagen and Flyswatter show up to inspect the prison, so Taura can get her revenge on them too. Sometimes everything just works out.

This is the fun time you want from a movie like this. It plays on all the exploitation notes you'd expect, from women in bondage, to lady-on-lady action, to women in various stages of undress, but it also has a lot of enjoyable elements that go beyond that. Sandy Brooke is a fun lead who brings you back to actors like Pam Grier and Margaret Markhov, and Suzy Stokey is great as the antagonist that Brooke wins over. Also I enjoyed Gant as the warden, she played that part to a T, but she also brought in some "women dealing with men in the workplace" elements that I wasn't expecting which were funny too. For some reason these movies often have a warden and a lackey, and Dawn Wildsmith was great in that lackey role too, being creepy and villainous. And then you have Ross Hagen and Dukey Flyswatter, aka Michael Sonye, who were fantastic. I love seeing them in anything, but they were particularly fun here. This just works on a lot of levels and will get you to the church on time.

Unlike Galaxy Warriors, which tried to make an Impossible Burger version of this type of film by removing the women in bondage and girl-on-girl exploitative aspects, this film leaned into them fully. That's not why it worked better though, I think an Impossible Burger version is still possible to make right. This worked because it had some really fun performances, the jokes landed better, and the effects were more realistic. I looked, and IMDb said this had a budget of $200,000, which is a lot more than Galaxy Warriors probably had, but it's not like this had a lot either--and I imagine a lot of that $200,000 went to the cast. So how does a Galaxy Warriors pull something like this off then? I think that's where Fred Olen Ray comes in. The sense of humor, the relationships with cast and crew, the experience to get things done quick and on the cheap, it's all there. We can poke fun at these all we want--and the volume with which Ray makes these means they aren't all hits--but there's a talent there to make these work at the level they do beyond the T-n'-A, and we can see it here. For anyone trying to make an Impossible Burger version of this, study the other things Ray does well here and try to replicate them.

Part of the strength of a movie like this is a great lead. With the 70s Corman films it was Pam Grier, who was maybe the best to ever do it. Sandy Brooke is great here too. She mixes the fun with the serious, all while getting groped and wearing a ripped tank-top without a bra underneath. Looking at her IMDb bio, she only has 11 credits, and many of them are much smaller parts than this. It's possible most of the parts she was offered after were like this one, which may not be as much fun to play, even if she was great at it. That's an area where the Impossible Burger version has an advantage, the star isn't put through the ringer as much, but in the 80s there wasn't an Impossible Burger version of anything--veggie burgers were something different from an actual burger, and no one considered that anything could approximate the real thing, all while cattle farming was being consolidated under Reagan's deregulation policies into the factory farms we have today, so at the same time that plant-based burgers were getting better, the inhumanely factory-raised beef we started getting was tasting worse. Is that another thing to consider? That the DTV market is just as assembly-line now that the quality of the films is such that an Impossible Burger version doesn't look so bad? But also, while a Sandy Brooke would only have had the real version of this kind of movie to make in the 80s, could we see more actresses like her take on these roles in a new Impossible Burger version? That might be the kind of thing that punches the Impossible Burger version up.

The other thing of course was having Ross Hagen and Dukey Flyswatter. Look at how great they look down there. The outfits alone were fantastic, but then you throw in their performances. Back in May of 2022 I had Kevin Vonesper on the podcast to talk about the documentary he was putting together, The Life and Slimes of Dukey Flyswatter and Haunted Garage, which is still in production as we speak, but hopefully will be out soon. That's episode 98 in the archives if you want to check it out, but he gave us a lot of great info on Flyswatter. Then we have the Ross Hagen, who's now on 8 films on the site. I don't know if the Hall of Fame is in his future, mostly because we don't see him as often on here, but between his performances in this film and Action USA, he's gotta be close. There's an inspired element here with Flyswatter and Hagen, they're bringing an energy to the proceedings that the film needed, and I think for people looking to make movies like this today, find people who can give you this--and if they're a bit more of a known commodity, pay for that one day of shooting to get this out of them--though if you can't, just come up with the outfits. Hagen's was probably recycled from another film, but how hard would Flyswatter's 80s suit and hair be to pull off?

Finally, we're at 16 director credits for Fred Olen Ray on the site. That puts him three up on Sam Firstenberg for second-most all-time as a director, but 27 behind Albert Pyun. The thing is, Ray has the CV, even if most of his output now is Christmas movies, I think I could count off 27 movies in the 80s and 90s that he's done that would be perfect for the site, but when will I get them done? I realized the last film of his I did was his Hall of Fame induction post back in October of 2020. That's way too long to go, but how much more frequently could I get to? One every three or four months? Call that four a year, so in 7 years we could be there? I'm not saying Pyun's director record is like Cy Young's career win total of 511 games, which will never be touched with the current five-man rotation in baseball where pitchers barely get 30 games a season, but it's kind of close to that when you consider how my cutting back to one review a week is similar to the baseball five-man rotation. When guys like Dolph, Camacho, Pyun, Daniels, Rothrock, etc. were racking up big numbers, I was doing upwards of three posts a week. There was a lot of tagging to be had at that time, just like when Cy Young pitched, pitchers pitched much more often, so there were a lot of wins to be had. So if we call Dolph the Babe Ruth of DTV action stars, is Pyun the Cy Young of DTV directors? Maybe?

Before I bore you with too many baseball analogies--especially for our readers outside the States who have no idea about baseball--let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this on Tubi in America. That's a great way to make it happen, grab some pizzas and some beverages and put this on a Saturday movie night with one or two other movies, and you'll be all set.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087945

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

Droid Gunner aka Cyberzone (1995)

We continue our Hall of Fame month at the DTVC with our next inductee, the great DTV director Fred Olen Ray. There were a lot of options for a film of his to cover for this post, but I liked that this one had a lot of names in it, plus it was free to stream--can never go wrong there. In addition to us, our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has covered this in his "It came from the video store" series, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Droid Gunner (or Cyberzone as you'll see it on the streaming services), has Beastmaster Marc Singer as "Jack Ford," director of such great films as The Grapes of Wrath and Stagecoach--or rather a guy who hunts down androids for a living in the future. When four pleasure droids turn up missing--stolen by one Matthias Hues--, the corporation missing them turns to Singer to find them. Tagging along is a droid specialist from the company, Rochelle Swanson, someone who can deactivate them without damaging them, which is very important when it comes to pleasure droids. Will our hero be able to make all this happen and save the day?

 

This is pure late-night 90s schlock, and I loved it for that. It had your classic Ray Skin-a-max elements, plenty of T n' A, but also great performances from a whole host of names, including, beyond Singer, Hues, and Swanson, Ross Hagen, Peter Spellos, Brinke Stevens, and Kin Shriner (which for someone whose mom watched General Hospital when I was growing up, he was a fun sight). Sure, this is done on a budget, and it bites on all kinds of popular films, like Star Wars, Blade Runner, and For a Few Dollars More, but for the midnight insomnia theater fare that I'm watching it for, it more than delivers.

Ray marks the third director in the Hall of Fame strictly for being a director, the other two being Albert Pyun and Cirio H. Santiago, which, for the DTV fans that we are, is fantastic company. Like those two, he's had some that I really didn't like, some that I loved, and a lot like this where I just enjoyed the ride. I think what I love most about his films, especially from this 90s period, is that he shoehorns a lot of sex and violence into them, but then there are a lot of these other touches like calling the main hero "Jack Ford" or how the plot becomes a take on For a Few Dollars More, which makes it more than just a late-nite 90s schlock exploitation fest. The funny thing is, recently my wife Jen and I were watching a Hallmark Christmas movie that Ray directed, and she was noticing similar touches, like the boy in the orphanage who looked straight out of 50s TV central casting. Like Dacascos, Ray's induction is probably one that's long overdue, but great to finally make happen.

 

The same way we needed to bring up Byron Mann in Dacascos's induction post, we'd be remiss if we didn't continue our efforts to spotlight Matthias Hues as well. He plays a bit of a roguish baddie in this, but also has a lot of fun with it, which is great to see. His playfulness underpins the tone Ray was going for, despite some of the dark future nature of the movie overall. As I've said in previous posts, we generally think of the stars as the people who carry these low-budget films, but when you look at the number of supporting people in this, many of whom do a lot of Ray films, you can see how important it is to have people like Hues who can show up and do their thing to round out the film and make it fun despite the time and budgetary constraints. Here's to you Matthias Hues, you're one of the great ones.

It's strange that we aren't getting to Marc Singer until the sixth paragraph, but with the DTVC, it's hard when you're in a Fred Olen Ray film that has Matthias Hues in it. Anyway, I really liked Singer here as the hero. He seemed to get what Ray was going for with the gunslinger-Western type, and he leaned into it well. Looking at his bio, it does surprise me that we don't have more of his stuff on here. I think other than this, we just have Savate with Olivier Gruner and Ian Ziering. He didn't even have a tag yet, which is crazy for someone of his stature. Well, we've at least taken care of that now. I'll need to at least cover the Beastmaster films in the future, so I imagine this won't be the last of him we see here.

 

Finally, among the other costars, I wanted to mention Kin Shriner, who is best known (though probably not known at all to most reading this) for his role on General Hospital. I bring this up, because my mother used to watch the ABC Soaps when I was growing up: All My Children, One Life to Live, and of course General Hospital. At that time, all of the three major broadcast channels had at least two, if not three or four daytime Soaps on--many people were up in arms in the late 80s during the Oliver North hearings, which preempted them a lot if I remember correctly. Anyway, my wife and I decided to check the other day, and on ABC, only General Hospital remains, and then Days is still on NBC, and CBS has Young and the Restless and Bold and the Beautiful. That's it of a once proud TV genre. Who knows exactly what did it, maybe fewer housewives staying home--though in college my bodybuilding buddy couldn't go to class before Days was over--; or my hunch, that the proliferation of talk shows and court shows, which don't require paying writers and actors, made Soap Operas less cost effective; and unlike scripted prime time TV, which saw a revival in the 2010s after being decimated by reality shows and true crime shows in the 2000s, it looks like the Soaps didn't have the same recovery. I want to say it's too bad, but obviously I wasn't watching them to know how many of them had been cancelled already, but it is still too bad for the people out there who did watch them for so long. Maybe saving the Soaps that are left is a good cause for me to take up...

But before we do that, it's time to wrap this up. You can stream Droid Gunner aka Cyberzone a lot of places for free, in particular Tubi, which has a good ad rate. I say, the next time you're up in the middle of the night and looking for something to watch, give this a spin. It'll take you back to the 90s in a good way.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112906

Sniper Special Ops (2016)

This was a Seagal flick on Netflix, so when I came back from hiatus I wanted to check it out to get caught up on as many Seagl flicks as I could. I also liked that it was directed by Fred Olen Ray, and features one of our favorites, Tim Abell. In addition to us, this has been covered by our friends Simon at Explosive Action and Mitch at The Video Vacuum, so you can go to their sites to see what they thought. Now, without any further ado...

Sniper: Special Ops is not connected with the Sniper series. In this one, Seagal plays a sniper who, I guess because he's in his mid-60s, spends most of his time sedentary and only moves when he has to. That unfortunately leads to him getting hemmed in by the baddies when a mission goes bad, and Tim Abell wants to go in and save him. He can't right away though, because he needs to go get supplies from a broken down vehicle--the thinking being that Seagal isn't going anywhere anyway, so there's no rush. Things seem off to Abell though. Will he get to the bottom of it before he and his men become collateral damage?

I don't know if I would call this a bait-and-switch, and I'll tell you why: when I see Fred Olen Ray directs and Tim Abell in the cast, I have a hunch who's carrying my movie, and I'm actually good with it. In fact, it allows me to have more fun with the fact that Seagal is spending most of the film sitting while Abell is the one out there taking care of business. Yes, in a just world Abell would be in the foreground of the cover of this with his name across the top, with Seagal sitting in a chair in the background and his name below Abell's, but that's not how it works, and I think Fred Olen Ray knows Abell gets that, and also knows it's up to him to make or break this; and also for a guy like Ray who does films on the quick and dirty, he needs to know he can call on people like Abell to play the part he needs as professionally as possible. This movie's not perfect by any stretch, but at 86 minutes, even the rougher parts move along quickly enough to make it enjoyable.

The IMDb synopsis actually mentions Abell first before Seagal, which I thought was a nice touch. I think the easy thing to do here is say that because Abell served in the military that that explains why he's good in this role--and I may have been guilty of that as well, except we saw him turn in an absolutely chilling performance as the baddie in the Mark Dacascos film Instinct to Kill, so his ability to carry this movie goes beyond his military background. I think the problem for Abell is he doesn't always get parts that have the weight to them that allows him to show what he can do. What's great about this situation is it feels like Fred Olen Ray is thinking, I need to lean on Abell to make this work with the time and budget constraints I'm under, and I think that comes from working with him a lot and knowing what he can do. I still put the Instinct to Kill performance above this one, but it's good to see Abell get the lead in a film, even if he's not on the cover.

And that leads us to our film's one Hall of Famer. If you go to Simon's review on Explosive Action, he actually does a breakdown of Seagal's screentime in the film. It's that scant. Normally I lead with the Hall of Famer, but I felt like Abell deserved the top billing he didn't get on the cover. There are two ways to look at Seagal's character: one, why is he even in this if this is all he's doing? or two, it's kind of a fun novelty that he's playing this small part. I think the funnier one might be Rob Van Dam, because he's also not in this much, but gets second billing, and I wonder how much they thought people might misread the cover and think it means Jean-Claude Van Damme. My understanding is Seagal and Van Damme don't get along, but I don't remember Rob Van Dam and Seagal having any scenes together, so they could have been in the movie together. Maybe that's something we can look forward to, a Seagal-Van Damme team-up where neither has any scenes together. The interesting thing is, his next review puts him in the 30 Club. He'll make a very interesting addition for sure.

One aspect of the film didn't play well with me, and that was at the base when Charlen Amoia, who plays an admiral's daughter trying to get pictures of the fighting, gets manhandled by Abell when he doesn't want her taking pictures. Abell is a very intense guy, and Amoia is very slight, so it made me uncomfortable to see him push her around like that--it was a different story when there was shooting and he had to pull her out of the way to save her. The way they end up growing on each other, it almost felt like Ray threw that in there as a kind of screwball comedy moment, and maybe that was the idea and under a tight shooting schedule they didn't have time to see how it looked after--or if by knowing how it would all turn out, it didn't feel as off-putting while shooting it. Just something that was a little bit off for me.

I wanted to wrap up by talking about Fred Olen Ray. This is his 14th tag here on the site, which puts him behind only Albert Pyun for most tags by a director. That might be a sign of things to come this fall when we talk Hall of Fame inductees, but right now, looking at his current work, it's a lot of TV movies--in fact, I believe this is the only movie that wasn't a TV movie that he's done since 2015. A lot of them are Christmas movies, which in a way makes sense, because the cable networks need tons of those, and who better than someone like Ray who can get it done quick and under budget. It makes sense for Ray too, because he doesn't need to worry about all the special effects he does in a film like this or some of the horror movies. That's not a problem for us though, he still has a ton of stuff in his back DTV catalog that we need to get to, and it could take years to exhaust it with reviews.

But that's for another day, right now we're wrapping this one up. If you're a Seagal fan, this is really for completists only. For a low budget DTV military actioner though, it does the trick, and I think with Tim Abell's performance, we can also enjoy the novelty of Seagal's small role. Right now you can still get it on Netflix, so it's not a bad deal to be able to watch it as part of the service you're already paying for.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0676248  

Bad Girls from Mars (1990)

I saw that this was on Instant, was directed by schlock auteur Fred Olen Ray, and looked like a fun time, so I figured why not make it happen.  Also, clocking in at 81 minutes doesn't hurt either.  Let's see then if I made the right choice.  Also, our friend Mitch at The Video Vacuum made this happen, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Bad Girls from Mars is about the making of a D film of the same name that has been beset by tragedy after tragedy.  It seems its leading ladies can't stop getting themselves murdered.  This isn't the worst thing for the film's producers, who stand to make a killing off the insurance if it's not made ("Springtime for Hitler" it's not), but they decide to take one last chance and hire a notorious madame who just published her tell-all book as their fifth lead.  The film's director can't handle all this stress, but when the murderer starts targeting him too, he's reaching his breaking point.  Will he be able to take enough Alka Seltzer and JD cocktails to keep himself sane?



This is really fun.  A USA Up All Nite style classic, complete with tons of boob shots that would've led to a lot of awkward edits in the cable TV version.  Ray does a great job of handling the spoof aspect in a way that doesn't become too gimmicky, which is hard with this kind of movie.  In a way it kind of feels like a Godard French New Wave film, in that it was a comedic commentary on the D industry the way Godard's films were a commentary on the then mainstream Hollywood industry-- the main difference being, where Godard would've had Jean-Pierre Leaud reading a socialist diatribe, Ray had one of his female stars showing her tits.  This is definitely what you come to a 90s sex romp for, and Ray delivers.

With someone like Fred Olen Ray, who has such a prodigious directing bio, there are bound to be some misses along the way, and it's possible because he needs to pump out so many over a short period of time, more of them end up misses to him than he'd like because he doesn't get the time or the resources to make it the way he wants.  It's good then when we get something like this, or Dinosaur Island, where we can showcase one of his hits, and what's funny about this one is that, in spoofing the D movie industry, he gives us an idea of how hard it is for him to make the movie he wants; but he does it in a way that's still funny and entertaining, and not whining, which is great for us in the audience.  When you think of that great USA Up All Nite aesthetic, no one does it like Ray, and this film is a great example of that.



After Tom Sizemore's pouring beer on his cereal in Point Break, this scene of the director mixing his Alka Seltzer with Jack Daniels is the all-time best degenerate alcoholic food moment in movie history.  Once I saw it, I knew I couldn't not talk about it.  I think when he actually drank it it was like cream soda or something, but still, the effect was there.  In my last post for Wicked, you may remember I mentioned a high school science teacher who was fired for giving another class non-alcoholic champagne.  Here's another great story about him.  One day that year the weatherman predicted a huge snow storm, and our teacher apparently banked on that happening and drank the lights out the night before.  Of course, even if this is the southern tip of Maine we're talking about, it's still Maine, and it still needs to be a massive snow storm to get school called, and that storm wasn't enough.  So he came into class with a hangover, and his lesson for the day was to show us how Alka Seltzer worked.  I'm not kidding.

There are plenty of other people in this.  The great Edy Williams plays the madame, and she seems to just go with all of it, whether she's changing in the back of a car, or telling the director she has a thing for men covered in garbage.  Speaking of the director, he's played by Oliver Darrow, and he hasn't been in much else.  That's too bad, because he was really funny here.  Fred Olen Ray mainstay Jay Richardson is in this as the overbearing obnoxious actor who only cares about his career.  I think he's given license to be as goofy as he wants here, and he definitely wants.  B horror and sci-fi great Brinke Stevens plays the costume girl and Richardson's woman.  She has almost 150 credits on imdb, of which almost all are DTV, and this is the first film of hers we've ever done, after well over 900 posts.  I have no idea how that happened, but it did.  Finally, Jefferey Culver played the producer.  I couldn't figure out who he looked like.  There were definitely some heavy notes of Jerry Orbach, a hint of the guy who played Bookman on Seinfeld, perhaps a dash of any former Murder She Wrote guest, and a blend of both Van Dyke brothers.



One thing you gotta love about watching any film is the director cameo, and Ray has two in this, one here as a guy robbing a liquor store, and later as a member of the crew tossing out scenes from the script-- literally throwing the pages out.  This one here as the liquor store robber looked like it was almost entirely improvised, or at the very least, not rehearsed.  I would've given you a shot of Ray without the bandanna over his face, but by the time he pulls it down, a topless Edy Williams shows up, and we can't show that if we want to keep oue blog without one of those parental warnings on it.

But hey, the movie's on Instant, so you can go there and see all the boobs you want.  Beyond the boobs, this is also a pretty funny and entertaining movie.  Fred Olen Ray delivers with a USA Up All Nite style classic, and it's well worth checking out.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101399/

Dinosaur Island (1994)

This was suggested to me on Instant, and right away I saw that it was co-directed by two of the greatest schlock auteurs, Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorski.  How can that not be good?  Throw on DTVC favorite Ross Hagen, and I was sold.  (The 79-minute runtime didn't hurt either.)

Dinosaur Island is about a troop of soldiers, led by Captain Ross Hagen.  He's bringing three guys back to the US to stand trial for misconduct.  They're relatively good guys, just a bunch of goofballs and trouble makers.  Anyway, the plane goes down and the troop washes ashore on a remote island.  There they find a bunch of beautiful native women who are terrorized by a massive dinosaur.  If they can kill the dinosaur, then they can live with these women happily ever after.



This movie was a lot of fun.  An exploitation send-up of the 50s deserted island savage women movies.  It's very USA Up All Night, and I'm sure this aired on it at some point.  It's perfect for a bad movie night, because it does a great job of making fun of itself, but there is plenty of room to make your own jokes too.  Now it is very R rated, so make sure you're in like-minded company if you do a group viewing, but if you know people that dig this kind of thing, it's great.  Wynorski and Ray deliver.

Ross Hagen is great in that Poor Man's William Holden role that we saw in those films of the 50s.  He uses terms like "terra firma" and won't let his guys forget about their mission; but he's also able to have a good time and joke with the guys too.  I was worried that we'd lose him here, because there's a point near the beginning where the film looks like it's going to focus entirely on the three guys, but fortunately my fears were assuaged, and he came back.  He's always so much fun, and he doesn't disappoint here.



The dinosaurs were absolutely fantastic schlock mega cheese.  So much fun to watch.  They were like a mix of Harryhausen and 1950s film technology.  And the shots of them with the actors were so dead-on, totally nailed those old movies.  Again though, while they may have been making fun of the genre, the way it was made left plenty of room for your own riffs, which I think makes a movie like this that much better.  Sometimes with the modern send-ups, they make the monsters so poorly, and use a lot of bad CGI, that we're left with only laughing with the film makers.  Ray and Wynorski know how to make these films right for their audience, and they pull it off.

Speaking of which, it doesn't say on imdb how this collaboration happened, if it was a collaboration at all.  Who knows if one guy started it and the other finished.  We don't like to think of it like that though, do we?  We like the idea of these two schlock titans teaming up like Lucas and Spielberg to give us the Indian Jones of low-budget films-- not to mention Roger Corman produced it, an even bigger figure in the schlock film industry.  As a side note, in the credits DTVC Hall of Famer David Carradine gets a thank you, and according to imdb, some of the film was shot on his land.  Too bad he couldn't be in the film too.



Look at that credit.  That came near the very beginning, and lets you know what kind of movie you're in for.  The thing is though, even with a warning like that, where they're all like "this is going to be a goofball fest", there are things that make no sense and are so much fun too.  On the image page, I took a screen of this shot of a dinosaur I guess howling at the moon as the sun set.  It was in this 70s-style TV film stock though, like it was a 70s PSA about saving the dinosaurs or something.  "A dinosaur is a terrible thing to waste."  "Somewhere a dinosaur is crying."  I don't know, but it was pretty fantastic whatever it was.

This is tons of fun, and a great USA Up All Nite throwback.  The availability on Netflix Instant makes it a no-brainer.  Wynorski and Ray deliver, and Ross Hagen is a nice slice of all right too.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109627/

American Bandits: Frank and Jesse James (2010)

Here we have another member of the Stars Play 11. What made this one a must-see before it was dumped? Fred Olen Ray directed, starring Peter Fonda and Jeffrey Combs. Is that not a must-see for you too? (A little warning: I'm about to kill this movie. My review is in no way intended to be an indictment of the entire Southern United States, merely the misguided notion that the South was wronged in the Civil War and post-War reconstruction, while not once mentioning the evil practice of slavery.) American Bandits: Frank and Jesse James takes place in the South after the Civil War. Upset that the North told them they couldn't own other human beings, and bitter about the fact that all their "honor and glory" in defending such an abhorrent practice couldn't save them when the North came down on their asses with a vengeance (including Mainer Joshua Chamberlain), a few have decided that guerrilla attacks on American governmental convoys is the honorable way to accept the war's outcome. Foremost among them: two real American heroes in Frank and Jesse James (Frank played by Tim Abell and Jesse played by a mix of a Poor Man's Brad Pitt, a Poor Man's Karl Urban, and the mysterious guest star on a CW teen drama-type). The dishonorable Northerner marshal (Peter Fonda) wants these two honorable bandits brought in at any cost, but the man chasing them is a Southerner too, and kind of likes the James brothers. Will they escape alive? Wow, I didn't know people still made movies like this. It's one thing to get something like Gone With the Wind in the 1930s, when people still wore black face-- not that that was okay then, but we like to think we've come a long way since then, that that kind of thing is no longer acceptable; and at least in Gone With the Wind, one could make the argument that it was their inability to cut loose the more abhorrent aspects of their way of life, like slavery, that overshadowed their more admirable traits. We don't get any of that here though, all we get is "the South is great, and they were so wronged in the Civil War". On top of that, we're now rooting for two villains that want to preserve the Southern way of life, including slavery. Why not just go full DW Griffith and have the Klan race in on horseback and save Frank and Jesse as Jeffrey Combs has them at gunpoint. Oh yeah, and it's also a Peter Fonda bait-and-switch. Don't wanna forget that. Jeffrey Combs is only in this at the beginning and the end, and is something of a baddie because he tries to double cross Frank and Jesse-- though they tried to double cross him first by walking off with his portion of the money and making him meet them later on at a ghost town. Did Combs not read the script in advance? Did his agent suggest this one without letting him know what he was in for? Maybe he thought by being a bad guy, the racially insensitive element staining the film wouldn't rub off on him. Well, he's right, because I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt here. According to his imdb bio, Fred Olen Ray was born in Wellston, Ohio, which is in the southern part of the state, east of Cincinnati. With that knowledge, it's not inconceivable that he'd have grown up with a "South will rise again" mentality, and people like Frank and Jesse James depicted as heroes. Is this his true belief, that the US would be a much better place if the South had won? Man, I hope not. Besides, if you know anything about American history, you'd know that a depression hit not long after the Civil War, forcing the North to abandon its reconstruction efforts, which allowed the South to go about their business, only replacing slavery with de facto slavery in the form of an apartheid that lasted unchallenged until the 50s and 60s. As a straight male, when I see a beautiful woman, there's very little that she can do that will make her unattractive. Defending a way of life that included the dehumanizing practice of owning other human beings though is a major turn off. In this case, Lauren Eckstrom plays Jesse James's love interest, and she's a very stunning woman; but the moment she starts talking about how much better the South was before the North came down and sorted them out, she might as well be Cpl. Klinger in drag. Racism is never a good look. The imdb page said this movie was filmed in Canyon Country, CA, but that picture looks like the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Either way, that's not the point, the point is, if the South had had their way, the only African Americans visiting the Grand Canyon would be slaves carrying their master's bags in lieu of donkeys. There's your "honor and glory", defended by a horde in white sheets, burning crosses and stringing up human beings off of trees. Every time this movie sanctimoniously brought up the South's "honor and glory" it made me sick to my stomach. It's actually ironic that this film would choose an image of the US National Parks system though, because one of the best representatives of freedom and equality in this country are our parks and monuments, whether it's the Buffalo Soldiers administering Yosemite, or Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That's true honor and glory, something worth defending. I'm still stunned that this movie exists, and that Fred Olen Ray of all people would make something like this. Maybe he just didn't know what he was doing, or what his film was saying. I don't know, I heard a lot of mentions of the South's "honor and glory", and no mention of the dehumanizing practice of slavery that they were so honorable in defending. It's bad enough in 1939, but in 2010, it's unacceptable. I understand that there was a bunker mentality after the war that made the North villains to Southerners, whether they agreed with slavery or not, but none of that nuance was on display here; I also know the North was far from perfect, but this movie isn't about the North, it's about the South and some myth of "honor and glory" that's total BS in this context. Oh yeah, and did I mention it's a Peter Fonda bait-and-switch to boot? For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446675/