Hunt Club (2022)

This was covered on episode 232 of the DTVC Podcast, back on October 14, when Ty and I did our Mickey Rourke double feature, "Rourke to Oblivion," and with Casper Van Dien, I figured it needed a review on here too. In addition to us, Chad Cruise at Bulletproof has covered this as well.

Hunt Club features Mena Suvari as Cassandra, a mother whose daughter disappeared. After a chance meeting with Tessa (Maya Stojan), a woman with a specific set of skills, they track the daughter's last known location to party a bunch of rich men throw on a remote island on a lake in the woods. Cassandra infiltrates the party while Tessa sneaks onto the island by raft, and soon both discover that this "party" is a bunch of Men's Rights douchebags who keep women captive, then hunt them in a sick game. Among the hunters we have old timer Carter (Casper Van Dien), who is trying to break in his son Jackson (Will Peltz), Virgil (Mickey Rourke), and brothers Preston and Teddy (Jeremy and Jason London). These men all think they're just going to have another fun hunt, but once Cassandra connects up with Tessa, they'll make this a hunt those guys won't forget--because they'll be dead. (See what I did there?)

There were some fun aspects to this, but I think it fell victim to the classic "only enough material for an episode of a syndicated TV show" issue. If we had a syndicated TV series where Suvari and Stojan went around the country taking down criminal operations like this, this would be a perfect 42-minute episode. Instead, because this needs to be 87 minutes, there's this delay where Stojan is taking her time getting to the island and putting away her raft, while some of these young women are getting killed. And this is a pretty rough way to go, be held captive for weeks on end in some barn, and then die a violent death in the woods after some guys hunt you down. That's not a simple horror movie kids having sex in a parked car getting hacked up by Jason kind of kill, that's pretty dark stuff, and to have people dying while our heroes are taking their time getting their shit together is kind of off-putting. When Stojan and Suvari's characters decided to kick it in high gear, it delivers a bit more on what its premise promises, and we get some nice kills, which I appreciated. I liked what they were going for here, and I think in a lot of ways they were successful, I just wish there would've been some more urgency among the main characters while the other women were getting killed off.

I thought we'd start with our two leads, Mena Suvari and Maya Stojan, because I thought they were both great. We'd seen Suvari on the podcast before, back when Jamie and I did Don't Blink on episode 27, but this is her first time on the site. I really liked her interplay with Will Peltz, where she's playing the more mature woman and wrapping him around her finger, and I think they could've leaned into that more and had her not get caught by the baddies herself, but rather find the girls on her own and break them out--and it was almost like they had her get caught by them both to pad out that portion of the film, and to have an excuse to, as the Brits would say, "get her kit off," which for me the whole thing betrayed the character they were building with her. For Stojan, we've actually seen her before, when we did the indie screener for Case 346. Unlike Suvari's character, who has this nuance of the grieving mother, Stojan's is pure badass, but again, the story construct betrayed that badassness, because we're like "when is Stojan going to save these other women?" while she's putting her raft away and they're getting shot by crossbows and stepping in bear traps. Also unlike Suvari, where this kind or role seems more like a one-off, I feel like we could have a lot more Stojan-led DTV actioners, which I would love to watch if they ever got made.

The other two big names familiar to the DTVC are Casper Van Dien and Mickey Rourke, and both were a lot of fun as baddies. For Van Dien, this is his 10th film on the site, which feels low for him, but I think that's because he's someone where I see a bunch of stuff of his I want to review, but don't get around to it. By all accounts, he should be in the 30 Club by now, and he's not even close, so maybe I can try to make a better effort to fix that. Like in Most Dangerous Game, he's a great baddie, he knows the assignment, and he delivers every bit of it. Every time we see him though it's a reminder that we need to get more of his stuff up, and hopefully I'll do that in the future. Rourke on the other hand is exactly the modern Rourke you expect. He's just a good actor giving the movie what it wants when they get him on board and give him a few pages of script to do--or in this case maybe he has a little more. This is only his seventh film on the site, but unlike Van Dien where that number is low, for Rourke it feels a bit higher, and a big part of that is he's in a lot of movies with bigger names on the site like Dolph and Michael Jai White, and I imagine because of that we'll see him a lot more in the future too.

Do you remember on the Cave Dwellers episode of MST3K? Especially the part where Ator and the female lead are about to be sacrificed to the snake god along with one other guy they had with him and a bunch of fair maidens the long-haired John Saxon guy brought. His friend Thong sneaks in to rescue them, but by the time he gets to Ator all the fair maidens and the guy have been sacrificed, and at one point I think it's Joel who says "geez, Gomez is taking his sweet time," and then there's a joke about padding. The movie's saying these fair maidens don't matter, it's only important for Thong to save Ator. Another example of this is in American Ninja 4, where everyone's about to be burned at the stake, when Dudikoff shows up to rescue them, but, again, is taking his sweet time, and in the process, one of the soldiers is burned alive. This movie has the same kind of issue with the women being hunted and killed while Stojan is taking her time stashing her raft on the island. It doesn't do anything to help the movie, and if anything hurts the perception of our heroes. I know filmmakers all know a lot more about movie making than I do, but as a fan of films and someone who likes to watch them, my piece of advice is, watch Cave Dwellers, and then don't do anything they do in that movie, and you should be in good shape.

Finally, this was directed by Elizabeth Blake-Thomas, and even though it was written by two men (one of whom, David Lipper, also played one of the hunt club guys), I think her direction de-male gaze-ified it, so to speak. Recently Jon and I discussed a movie called Private Obsession for an upcoming podcast episode, where Shannon Whirry is held captive by the 90s equivalent of a Men's Rights douchebag, and most of the movie is her being mentally tortured and starved and whatnot, but then in the last five minutes she turns the tables on him, and there's this sense on filmmaker Lee Frost's part of "hey, see, I don't agree with this stuff because I had the guy get his comeuppance." Blake-Thomas for the most part divorces the movie from that concept, there isn't a tone of a guy filmmaker getting off on seeing a woman mistreated like this, but then thinking he's distancing himself from it by turning the tables at the end. I think that's why the part in the early middle where women are getting killed while Stojan is stashing her raft was so off-putting, because it betrayed the rest of what the movie was doing, at least for me. I think as this Manosphere concept grows, and people try to make sense of it with endless op-eds about why modern men are so disaffected, having voices that cut through that bullshit will be that much more important, and what I appreciated here was when Stojan's character finally joins the party it became the movie I was hoping it would be. When I was in undergrad, I wrote a paper about how the Taliban's restrictions on women were used to keep the overall population in Kabul under their thumb, and my professor told me "you didn't discuss at all how the women involved feel about this," and I think that's often what happens when we have these "commentaries" on toxic attitudes, whether it's chauvinistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., people spend too much time on the people with the horrible attitudes, and less on how the people who are targets of that animosity feel; and this film, at least when it gets going, does a better job of that, and hopefully we'll see more of that in the future.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Tubi here in the States. I think the runtime, the performances, and the way the story ultimately resolves itself is worth a watch, even if I think it would've worked better if we'd been able to see the heroes get after it sooner. And if you haven't yet, you can check out the Rourke to Oblivion podcast episode Ty and I did where we discuss this, number 232 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21220802

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Countdown aka Serial Bomber (1996)

For our next 2024 Hall of Fame inductee, we have the man we've termed The Seagal Whisperer, Keoni Waxman. Since we'd already done all nine of his Seagal films on here, I decided to go earlier in his filmography for his induction post, and cover this film here, which I found on Tubi. (More on that later!)

Countdown aka Serial Bomber has Lori Petty as an FBI agent in Seattle trying to take down serial bomber extraordinaire Jason London. When his Japanese national girlfriend is arrested, Petty and co. think they have the key to bringing him down, but when Yoko, an officer from Tokyo PD (Yuki Amami) shows up to escort the girlfriend back to Japan, London gets antsy and starts to up the game with his fancy bombs placed around the city. Now it's up to Petty and Amami to bring this guy to justice, while a soundtrack of late 90s alternative music plays in the background.

This wasn't bad. Yes, by the end the whole cat and mouse thing had gotten tired, it may have worked better as an episode of a late 90s syndicated TV show; and there were a few incidents that were a little off, like Jason London beating up Petty's mom, or when a bomb squad expert seems to have solved the wiring London put together for him bomb, only to have him get blown up anyway--London was plenty diabolical without any of that. The biggest key for me is Lori Petty, who is fantastic in the lead; and then we have a great supporting cast, including London and Amani, plus James Le Gros as the FBI chief, which was sweet to see, but made me wish we also had BoJesse Christopher hanging around too. The music was fantastic as well, 90s alternative, none of which were hits, but they sounded like songs that were hits, which is nice enough. For a late 90s free streamer, this does what you need it to do, and sometimes that's all you need. 

For his yeoman's work on Seagal films alone, Waxman was deserving of a slot here in the Hall of Fame, but now that he's joining other Hall of Fame directors with his tag count--this is 13 for him, which is a three-way tie for third--it was really overdue. This is the earliest of his films we've reviewed, coming out two years before Sweepers, which we know he had some friction making with Dolph. I liked this better than Sweepers, telling me that he probably didn't have those same issues with Lori Petty, but he also said he learned from his experience on Sweepers, which probably made him more amenable to an even more demanding star like Seagal, leading to him directing Seagal in nine films between 2009 and 2017, plus all the True Justice episodes. One thing Scott Murphy from All 90s Action, All the Time and I have noticed as we've been going through all of Seagal's DTV flicks fpr the DTVC podcast, is Seagal often works with a director two or three times, and then that's it, meaning Seagal's people probably sign them on for more than one film, knowing how bad Seagal is to work with. I can't imagine Waxman signed a nine-picture deal, meaning he had to have re-upped at some point, or that there were line producers like Ben Sacks who were like "hey Keoni, we need you again," like that friend with a pick-up truck who's always getting called when someone is moving. He's had five films since his run with Seagal was over, one of which we've done here, The Hard Way, but according to IMDb he doesn't have anything in development right now. Even if he's taking a break, he's put together a Hall of Fame resume, and is  truly deserving of his induction. Here's to you Mr. Waxman, you're one of the greats.

 
This is our third Lori Petty film on the site, but the first real DTV one, because the other two were Point Break and Tank Girl. 1996, when this came out, was only one year removed from Tank Girl, and when I looked at her IMDb bio, that looks like her last big screen big budget production. From there she's bounced around between television appearances, voice work on Batman and Superman cartoons, and now microbudget horror films that could use her face on the tin to sell streams. On the one hand I don't get it, because she's great here, like she was great in Tank Girl and great in Point Break; but on the other I do, because I think for as great as the 90s were, they weren't ready for a Lori Petty. Now in the 2020s it feels like we have too many Lori Pettys, but none as great as she is, it's almost like the idea of being like a Lori Petty is enough now. Back in the 90s, other actors cut their hair short and did a Lori Petty-like performance to show their range, but no one made a career of being a Lori Petty the way they do now. Had Lori Petty been born in 1993 instead of 1963, every prestige TV show, indie movie, and blockbuster would have her in it. Instead, she was born in 1963, ahead of her time, but still able to shine in roles like this. I saw that she had a PM flick in 2001, Firetrap, so you know we'll make that one happen soon, meaning this won't be the last time we see her here.

Was Jason London Eminem a few years before Eminem was Eminem? It looks like it in that shot there, doesn't it? 24 when this movie came out, he's every bit the young Gen Xer with his hair, and his beanie, and his big coats. You could've seen him hanging out with Ian on The Grind with Eric when they did the alternative song. "Oh, they're playing Sabotage, where's Ian? There he is, with his messy hair and post office jacket!" There's also a little Eric Nies in this performance too, London is both alternative Gen Xer and pretty boy Gen Xer. But then we have to throw in the 90s baddie who's good at everything and has everything figured out. He knows how to wire the bombs, find out information on the FBI agents after him, break into places and leave tapes everywhere, and is pretty handy with a gun if you need him. All at 24. I was looking at his IMDb bio to see how his career arc got him here too, and he doesn't have the big screen hits Petty had. In '93 he was the star of the indie hit Dazed and Confused, then appeared in a couple Aerosmith videos, but it was mostly DTV and TV appearances from there, meaning this film may have been a step down from those things, but par for the course for what he was being offered. This is now 7 films for him on the site, and while we don't specifically seek his films out, with the volume he does, we'll no doubt see him again.

Finally, I usually save my "where you can find this" for the eight paragraph, but this was an interesting one that required a longer space to vent. IMDb said this was on Tubi, but when I searched it didn't show up, and when I clicked  the link on IMDb it didn't show up either. Letterboxd said the same, but same lack of result. Letterboxd also said Freevee had it, but when I checked Amazon the same thing happened. So I checked Plex, because sometimes they have things that others don't, especially 90s actioners like this. They told me they didn't have it, but gave me links to Tubi and Freevee too. And that's how I got it, I clicked the link in Plex that took me to Tubi, and that's where it worked. How does any of that happen? I mean, searching for "Countdown" didn't reveal it on Tubi, and looking up Keoni Waxman didn't reveal it, but clicking through the Plex link? I'm not sure how it works, but at least I was able to watch the movie and get screens for the review.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As I said above, you can get this on Tubi here in the States, but if you don't see it when you search, try clicking through the link on Plex. This isn't horrible, despite its flaws, it's a fun time with the all names and the nostalgia for the late 90s. And congratulations to Keoni Waxman on your Hall of Fame induction! It was truly yeoman's work directing all those Seagal DTV actioners, but someone needed to do it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115953

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Fury of the Fist and the Golden Fleece (2018)

In furthering our celebration of Cynthia Rothrock joining the 40 Club, I figured I'd finally give this one a look. Not only does it have her, but two other 30 Club actors, Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Michael Dudikoff. On the other hand, for a film with all these names, it seemed suspicious that none of the other usual suspects had covered this, and it only had two critic reviews and 10 user reviews. Let's see if the suspicions were warranted.

Fury of the Fist and the Golden Fleece is, beyond being a difficult title to type, an attempted send-up of old grindhouse movies about a guy named the Fist who hilariously is both a martial arts fighter and a former porn star--trust me, I'm laughing on the inside. Stuff happens though, and he finds he has to fight people, along with a couple friends, and eventually that leads him to the head baddie, played by Michael Dudikoff. Other stuff happens, including a lot of dick jokes, fights, and all kinds of computer generated video effects, for roughly an hour and 40 minutes, and then for 7 minutes more stuff happens as the credits roll. But it does have a lot of names that make cameos, so there's that.

Between my 4th and 5th years of college--yes, I took five years to get my BA--I dated a girl who had two kids, one that wae three, and the other not quite two. One of the times I was over there, the mother was changing the not quite two-year-old, and while she was getting the diaper, he got away and started peeing. He was so fascinated that urine was coming out of his penis, that he ran over to show me, and I was like "yeah, it does that, isn't that crazy?" Beyond the fact that it's hard to think that that almost two-year-old is old enough to drink now, this movie smacked of a couple guys who just learned what their penis can do, and watching it, I felt like the adult saying "yes, it does that, isn't that crazy?" It wasn't just that the film was full of dick jokes, but they were like "penises are so great, I can't believe I'm just learning about mine!" Whether they were dick jokes or other kinds of jokes, they often didn't quite come off like they should have, and when they did hit, they didn't know when to stop. It was like if you've ever been at a party and told a joke everyone thought was funny, and another guy there thinks he's funny too, so he follows you around and tells you a bunch of jokes that for the most part don't work, but when one lands he goes back to that well over and over, and you're just trying to get away. There were some fun moments though. I think had it been shorter, had a comedic writer helped with the jokes, and if the two stars--one of whom was director and co-writer, the other of whom was the other writer--had not been in it and they left the film to the stars they cast, it might have worked. Unfortunately for me it was a miss, and I guess that's why it doesn't have more buzz considering those names.

Because I'm including this as part of the celebration for Rothrock joining the 40 Club, I'll start with her, even though she's barely in the movie. She has one quick fight scene, which was good, but we could've had more. For example, we had Jean-Claude Van Damme's daughter Bianca Brigitte, why didn't we have a fight scene between those two? That would've been more compelling than a lot of what we ended up with. Also, the big plot device was that our Fist character eats meatballs that have estrogen in them, and he loses his mojo. So too much estrogen means someone can't kick ass? Beyond the fact that that kind of joke was more appropriate in the 90s, how can you have kickass women like Rothrock and Bianca Van Damme and say that our hero ingesting estrogen makes him weak? I'll take the Pepsi challenge with Rothrock's stuff over this any day.

 

Close on Rothrock's heels for his own inclusion in the 40 Club, we're now at 38 for Don "The Dragon" Wilson--though it seems like two films we tagged him in, Saigon Commandos and The Siege of Firebase Gloria, have been removed from his IMDb bio, so he may only be at 36. In this he has a bigger part than Rothrock, which is nice. He played a fun send-up to the 70s Hong Kong martial arts master. I'd be interested to see how he did with more of these roles, like maybe something done by Michael Jai White who has a good mix of a keen sense of humor and fantastic martial arts skills. In Black Dynamite he had some send-ups to the old martial arts movie that came off really well, and the way Wilson carried his part off here, it would be fun to see what they could do together. As far as the 40 Club for him, he has three movies on Tubi that I can do, so that'll be easy to get one more--Scorpion King 4 is one I've seen, but didn't get any images before it was removed from Tubi, so I'm waiting for it to come around again. The question then is, where could he go from there? He's making more stuff, so we could potentially get another 10 movies from there, it's just a matter I guess of how many more older ones get dropped from IMDb for technically not having him in them.

We last saw Michael Dudikoff here back in January of 2020, and that was the first time since we'd done In Her Defense in 2011. This is now 33 films for him--he has 34 tags because we did American Ninja 2 twice--and I don't see us getting that many more unless he has a greater outburst of films, but that may be okay for him, he's already given us a lot of greats. His role here as the main baddie was one of the few real standouts in this to me. The Joker make-up combined with the maniacal nature, I'd love to see him do more crazy baddies in DTV flicks. Like if they ever made a DTV Expendables, where maybe you have Rothrock, Wilson, and Daniels as the heroes, they could have Fred Williamson as the Machine Gun Joe type, and Dudikoff as the baddie, and maybe Matthias Hues as his hatchet man. Oh, maybe add in Dacascos with that trio of heroes too. Should we tack on Gruner too? Anyway, let's get this DTV Expendables made, and load up all those names in a film all us DTV action fans can enjoy.

Finally, making a movie a comedy sometimes has the effect of insulating it from criticism. "Of course that was bad, you just don't get the joke, we made it bad on purpose!" I get that, and the point could be made that I just didn't get the humor here, or it wasn't my style. It just seemed like overall there wasn't a lot of cohesion, people just show up, there's a bunch of close-ups and sound effects, then they fight and CGI blood appears, and then we go to more things happening that make no sense, close-ups and sound effects, and more fights and CGI blood splatters. In once scene, there's this fight at the bagel burger place the hero and his friends work at, and he does this back kick thing to the baddies over and over. I get repeating the scene if you only have 60 minutes of footage and need to stretch things, but the movie was an hour and 47 minutes! It needed to cut things, not extend the joke. Another scene, the director's character kicks a baddie holding a gun, which causes the baddie to shoot another baddie. It was funny, but then they repeat it. Again. And again. Like over ten times. And it's like "it's hilarious, the guy keeps getting shot with CGI blood splatters and he's yelling in pain!" Going back to Black Dynamite or Machete and why those worked, I think a big part of it was the people making those lived in the 70s and 80s during the Grindhouse era, so they got the vibe better, whereas the guys making this were younger, more my age, and there was almost a sense that they were trying to remake Machete or Black Dynamite more. For me, this would've worked at 80 minutes, played a little bit straighter, but still as a comedy, with Don Frye's character as the hero. Just get rid of the characters played by the director and his co-writer, maybe do 30% of the dick jokes--which may still be more dick jokes than any other movie--and let the guest stars, of which there were many, do their things.

But ultimately we didn't get that, and what we did get didn't work for me. As of this writing you can get this on Tubi here in the States. Maybe if you're a completist of the stars like me, you make it happen, otherwise beware the siren song of all these names calling you in. It seems this was ignored by the usual suspects for a reason.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2490148

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Acceleration (2019)

This is the second of three films Dolph had come out in 2019, coming just a month before Hard Night Falling, and about three or four months after The Tracker. If either of those two are any guide, we can't expect much Dolph from this. That being said, the fact that it was leaning heavily on Natalie Burn, which was something I said Hard Night Falling should have done, gave me hope. In addition to us, our friend Cam Sully at Action Elite has covered this, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Acceleration has Natalie Burn as an underground enforcer who has the special skills needed to handle tough situations for shady characters. When underground boss Dolph Lundgren kidnaps her son and makes her carry out 5 tasks, she now has to not only do these tasks, but find out where her son is so she can rescue him. The issue is, why does Dolph want these tasks carried out, and what does he have to do with Sean Patrick Flannery, the local kingpin and guy whose name is top billed on the tin? Can she figure it out before her son dies?

Among the recent Dolph efforts, I think I liked this one best, but it still had its flaws, including a very convoluted twist at the end that we didn't need. The biggest thing is that, unlike Hard Night Falling, this film focuses on Natalie Burn, and doesn't even sell itself as a Dolph flick so much as a flick that also stars Dolph. That helps, because you don't go in with any expectations, and then are allowed to be excited by what Burn brings to the table. The thing I wonder is, why not trim it further? Why not get the kid aspect out of it, and just have her doing jobs for Dolph because she wants to get paid? She's a hired gun with no past who just does the job. "I have five jobs for you, if you get them done by sunrise, you get this bonus." Then we can root for Dolph and we don't need a plot twist at the end to redeem him. Just a thought, but overall this is pretty good.

Dolph continues to add to his already record number of reviews on the DTVC, and with all the films of his I watched for the Dolph List on Letterboxd, I have a bunch more in the can that I need to write reviews on--and considering this movie was one I watched after I made the list, it doesn't even put a dent in that backlog. One of the ways we've been seeing Dolph lately is in this role, where he's taking a backseat to let someone else shine, and it really happens here with Burn. It's very similar to another one-word A title he did, Altitude, where he sat in a cockpit and let Denise Richards have the lead, now he's in a control center letting Natalie Burn do it, and it works both times. It looks like Dolph doesn't have anything slated for release in 2020, but that's okay, we have a long way to go before he's finished here with that backlog.

As I mentioned above, Natalie Burn really has a chance to shine here, and she does, which is great to see. Again, I don't think we needed the son construct, and I wonder if there's a sense that, because Burn is a woman, we wouldn't feel it as organic if there isn't a Lifetime Movie mama bear/Taken aspect to underpin it, which is too bad. I think she's plenty badass enough to not need that, and she showed that in this movie. In a way, all of that other stuff about her needing to find her son and her feelings surrounding that padded out the movie and dragged it down, which you don't want in a movie called "Acceleration". Drag works against acceleration, which is bad.

The other big drag on this movie was the whole other plot with Sean Patrick Flannery as the big boss trying to track down junkie Jason London about a deal he screwed him on. That whole thing was as paint-by-numbers DTV as I've seen, so much so they may as well have just went up to Michigan and filmed it with a Bruce Willis without his reverse shots. For me, I think that's one of the big issues with modern DTV, is they don't really do anything new, and when they do, they can't commit to it all the way. We've been seeing that former big screen actor now playing a crime boss paradigm for so long now, complete with their quirky Pulp Fiction wannabe philosophies. And you get the juxtaposition here when Flannery's character is sitting across from Burn's, and he's waxing philosophical about the lemon meringue pie--we're seeing the tired, well-worn territory getting recycled again, while right in front of us is the new and exciting next step that DTV needs to take, but they're just not comfortable enough diving in. I get it, the Michigan/Louisiana-filmed Bruce Willis not doing his reverse shots crime thing gets streams, but it's the kind of thing I'm pretty much done reviewing on this site.

Finally, among the many names in this--and there are many--the one that really stood out in a supporting capacity was Quentin "Rampage" Jackson. I think as far as former UFC fighters in movies go, he's got the most natural talent onscreen, which is a huge advantage for him. It'll be interesting to see if he can get some actual leading roles, and what he can do with them. Other names, Danny Trejo is great as usual. He's developing an Eric Roberts ability to make a lot out of a tiny appearance. Chuck Liddell is another former UFC star in this. I believe this is four films he's done with Dolph, in addition to Riot, Altitude, and War Pigs. He's not the natural Jackson is, and I feel like out of those four, Altitude did the best job of putting him in situations where he can succeed. Maybe what he needs is a turn as one of the good guys in a supporting role.

And with that, I think it's time to wrap this up. I saw this initially on Hoopla, but since then it's been made available on Prime as well. I think it is very much something you shouldn't shell out extra for, but if it's already part of your streaming package, or you can get it on Hoopla, it's worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9534808

The Prophecy: Forsaken (2005)

This is the second of two Prophecy sequels written by our friend Johnny Sullivan (Twitter @johnnyblackout), who also wrote the fantastic Recoil.  Because both are on Instant, it worked out great that I could watch both, and Johnny was gracious enough to answer my questions about the writing process of both this, and the one before it, The Prophecy: Uprising.  Also, our friends at Comeuppance Reviews and The Video Vacuum have done this one and the previous one too, so you can go there to see what they thought.  (And I feel bad that I totally forgot to include their links to Uprising in that review.  Sorry guys.)

The Prophecy: Forsaken picks up where Uprising left off.  Kari Wuher is protecting the Bible, but now a new angel wants it, played by the great Tony Todd.  Angels can't get blood on their hands though, so he sends hit man Jason Scott Lee to kill Wuher.  Lee has a change of heart though after something inside Wuher tells him not to.  After she escapes, she seeks out the Devil's help (played again by John Light), but can she trust the Devil?  If not him, then who can she trust?  And why does Tony Todd want this damn book so bad?



This is pretty good.  It's not quite as good as Uprising, mostly because it's so short-- only 75 minutes, which, I know, it's crazy I'm complaining about the length being too short, but the shortness prevented us from developing the great characters played by Lee and Todd further.  Still, I found it to be a fun DTV supernatural thriller, and was a fun companion to Uprising.  Wuher, Lee, Todd, and Light all turn in great performances, and anyone who's a fan of them will enjoy seeing them here.  Not a bad deal for something on Instant.

As I mentioned above, Johnny was kind enough to tell us about the writing process for both of these films.  One thing I see a lot in the Netflix reviews and other places the films are discussed, was the idea that this was one script turned into two movies, and that wasn't true.  Johnny had two previously written unrelated scripts that he made into these films, and both of them were rewritten by director Joel Soisson to his personal vision and to fit Dimension's budgetary restrictions.  He said both films were meant to be short, but this one was shorter than his initial 80-90 page script, and it was very different from both the original story it was based on, and what he sold to them.  Also, fun fact, he got his Twitter handle from the original title of the Forsaken script: "Johnny Blackout".  You can read more about his work on these films in the Uprising review.



Kari Wuher reprises her role from Uprising, this time getting a little more background on her story.  We find out she was in Bucharest working at the church where the sacred Bible was kept because she was finishing her PhD dissertation on theology from the University of Chicago.  As the story becomes more convoluted, and we don't know who to trust, we're still with her exclusively and rooting for her to prevail, even if her prevailing isn't the best thing for us.  It makes for a level of nuance in a 75-minute DTV flick that we seldom see, which is always welcomed.

Tony Todd comes in as a bad angel and is immediately menacing, yet also has the sophistication you want from a character like that.  The man is the consummate professional, and has a pile of credits in everything from big Hollywood pictures to DTV to TV movies to TV shows to video game voice work.  I love seeing him in anything, and he was great here.  Jason Scott Lee, like Todd, had a cool part, but also like Todd, his role was underdeveloped, which was a disappointment.  I guess the issue was, how do you tell us who Lee and Todd are, while still centering the film around Wuher, and keeping it all in under 75 minutes.  Oh, and Jason London reprised his small role as Simon, Wuher's guardian angel.



Finally, John Light is back as the Devil, and he's even better this time.  Here is a great scene with him eating a Twinkie.  I love the idea of the Devil not exactly being the bad guy, but he's still the Devil and still a bad guy.  Like, he's helping Kari Wuher, but he helps her by killing a little girl.  How do we make peace with that?  We do it through John Light's great performance.  I joked in the Uprising review that he was the Poor Man's Dane Cook, and the first Poor Man's anyone to be better than the original; but now I'm going with him as great on his own, and won't put him and Dane Cook in the same sentence anymore, even as a joke.

Both as something to check out on Instant and as something you might come across on cable at 3AM, this isn't a bad deal.  I liked Uprising better, but after Uprising this is only another 75 minutes, so not bad to watch after.  Also, I'd say that watching Forsaken without seeing Uprising first is a bad idea, because you need to know what happened in Uprising.  And again, thank you to Johnny for answering my questions and talking about the film with us, I really appreciate it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439771/

The Prophecy: Uprising (2005)

Our friend Johnny Sullivan (Twitter @johnnyblackout ), a screenwriter who wrote the great Stone Cold Steve Austin actioner Recoil, mentioned that before that, he wrote two Prophecy sequels, this one and Forsaken.  He also mentioned that his original scripts were rewritten quite a bit, but that I should give the movies a look.  Considering how great Recoil was, and how gracious he was after I watched it in answering my questions about the process of making it-- and the fact that all five Prophecy films are currently on Instant--, all made this a no brainer.  Oh, and Kari Wuher in it didn't hurt either.

The Prophecy: Uprising is about a British detective of Romanian descent working in Bucharest.  He has a lot of personal demons he's trying to atone for, in particular a brutal mistake he made as a youth that he really couldn't be blamed for.  Anyway, a mysterious man claiming to be an Interpol agent approaches him for help solving a case.  At the same time Kari Wuher, living and working in an Orthodox church in the city, discovers the priest she works for dead on the floor of the basement, and a voice in her head (Jason London) telling her to pick up his massive bible.  Now she's fleeing from a rogue demon that wants the book, and our hero's Interpol agent is recruiting our hero to help her protect it before the bad demon can get it-- but can he trust the Interpol agent?



This is a fun DTV horror/suspense thriller.  It's compact, with the listed 88 minute runtime actually a good amount shorter with the credits taken out, and none of that time is wasted.  This is a reboot of the Prophecy franchise, and as such could've been full of onerous plot exposition to introduce us to the new storyline, but fortunately that doesn't happen.  I think when we see a DTV sequel of an established theatrical property, we hope for something like this: quick moving, not full of itself, but also not devoid of substance.  This story, while trim and lean, still had great moments, especially the plot twist at the end that I really liked.  This is the kind of 3AM insomnia burner that you see on the guidebar and find yourself still up at 5 (with commercials) finishing it off, thinking of the Tweet or Facebook status update about how little sleep you got last night that you're about to fire off.

It was great to be able to converse with Johnny via e-mail about this film.  I don't want to tell you too much about his original story, because it will give away this film, but he said he had written the script initially as a project that had nothing to do with the Prophecy.  Then he went to Dimension films after selling another script to Sony (which wasn't produced), and they asked him to work on The Prophecy reboot, which was one of many projects they had control over at that time, but needed to be rebooted because they couldn't get Christopher Walken anymore (he also pointed out that this was before the term "reboot" was en vogue).  He pitched that original script, and they loved it, he just needed to amend it to a DTV sequel scale.  He wrote both Uprising and Forsaken, and sold them both to Dimension.  From there though, director Joel Soisson rewrote them to his own vision.  What was interesting for me was how cohesive and consistent it felt despite having two writers, because often that's the death knell for a movie, too many cooks in the kitchen.  He said that, while it was heavily rewritten, the key elements-- especially the plot twist I liked, and the main thread about the bible, were his, which is probably why it still worked.  I will say though, between the two, Recoil, which was completely Johnny's movie and wasn't rewritten, was the better film; but to some degree comparing them is like apples and oranges.



Kari Wuher might have been one of my first celebrity crushes, back when she was on Remote Control in the late 80s.  I also remember that that was the first non-music video show on MTV.  Man, did that open the floodgates, here I am 25 years later watching Catfish while typing this review.  Videos?  You watch those on YouTube now, I watch MTV for Catfish.  Anyway, so you know, I go into seeing Kari Wuher in a film with that imprint on my brain from that many years ago.  But I think too, her character works as someone you genuinely want to root for, whether you had a crush on her as far back as 1988 or not, and that makes everything else in the film work that much better.

We've done over 900 movies here at the DTVC in over 6 years, and we still find things that we haven't see before.  John Light provides that moment for us here.  He looks like a Poor Man's Dane Cook, right?  Yet, as a Poor Man's, he's better than the original!  I've never seen the Poor Man's version be better than the original before.  I understand, when we're talking about Dane Cook, being better isn't hard, but still, a first is a first, and we have to acknowledge it.



I don't know if you know, but this movie was shot in Romania.  It's well established, with a lot of establishing shots.  They weren't like artistic Ozu establishing shots though, there was a lot of time elapsed film and whatnot.  I think the most egregious case of the overused establishing shots was Fast Five, where it was like "Hey, we're in Rio!"  "Did you know this film takes place in Rio?"  "Oh, by the way, Rio!"  "Hey, Rio!"  I think in The Prophecy: Uprising though, with this type of film, it worked.  It evoked that imagery we already have of Romania and Transylvania in a horror film, plus the old Orthodox churches and gave us that supernatural mystical version of Christianity that we need for a movie like this to work.  So, as gratuitous as the establishing shots might have seemed, I think they worked in adding to the atmosphere.

Especially while this film is available on Instant, it's worth a look, but if you see it for rent or on TV, I'd check it out too.  It's a fun, 90-minute, DTV supernatural-suspense thriller.  This is what we come to DTV for, to be entertained for an hour-and-a-half, and The Prophecy: Uprising does that.  Also, thank you again to Johnny Sullivan for taking the time to talk with me about this and about his role in making the film.  I really appreciate it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365658/

Fatal Call (2012)

This is another in the group of films Kevin at MTI Video sent me, and was probably the one I was most excited to look at.  It stars DTVC favorite Kevin Sorbo, personal favorite Danielle Harris, and a couple of other familiar faces in main star Jason London and the ubiquitous Lochlyn Munro.  Let's see if it lived up to that excitement.

Fatal Call has London as a guy with a past from rural Illinois who moves to St. Louis to start a new life after a buddy gets him a job at a law firm.  Things are looking even better when he meets Danielle Harris at a bar, and she gives him her number.  Problem is: she has a husband, and he's abusive and controlling.  Now she wants London to help her out, but when he goes to her place to pick her up, he finds her husband dead and he looks like the one who did it.  Will he make it out of this mess alive?



I liked this.  It was a pretty fun Noir-ish suspense flick, with a good cast and a decent story.  My one main complaint was that London's character vacillated between aw-shucks-schmuck and quick-thinking-resourceful-you-picked-the-wrong-guy patsy, which made the plot move unevenly.  For the most part though it hit the spots you'd want in this kind of film.  Harris was great as the Black Widow type; we had fun detectives in Munro and his partner Srikant Chellapa; Sorbo was deviously sinister; and the plot maintained a good balance between tension and action.  In fact, I loved the device of jumping us forward and back in the story, because it kept things from getting too gummed up with the plot exposition.  All in all, it's not a bad deal.

Danielle Harris was a standout for me, and I was disappointed that she wasn't used more in the film.  She seemed to understand what her character was supposed to be about, but unlike some Film Noir greats, like Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon or Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, where we had this Black Widow character that we knew we couldn't trust, but also knew why our hero would take a chance on her and get himself in trouble, Harris's character, who's in their tradition, is woefully underutilized.  She shows up, sleeps with London, then he's in trouble and she's out.  We needed more intrigue here, with her seducing him and slowly pulling him into her web, and I know from what she did with her limited role, she could've pulled it off.  Either way, it was definitely cool to see her get a non-Scream Queen part and hit it out of the park.



We all love Sorbo here at the DTVC, in particular his two films with Saint James St. James, Poolboy and FDR American Badass, so anytime we can get him back here is a good thing.  He's the baddie, which is a great change of pace for the usual hero he plays.  I've never really thought about it, but he's a pretty big guy, and can be pretty imposing.  He's also the kind of actor that can have a lot of fun as the baddie, so it was good to see him get that chance.  Like Harris, it's good to see him in anything, but also like Harris, it's good to see him try something beyond the norm and excel at it.

With these two paragraphs focusing on Harris and Sorbo, I don't want to take anything away from London as the star, because as an actor, he was good playing both the schmuck and the quick thinker that his character called for, it just felt off for me to be going from one to the other with no real reason for the transition.  To be honest, it felt more fun to see him in the aw shucks role, and I could see myself falling for Harris's character if I were in the same circumstance, what with her batting her eyelashes and quoting Dostoevsky at him.  Unlike his character though, I'd call the cops the moment her husband showed up and assaulted me, and would've avoided all the trouble he got into.



Finally, this is London's work buddy, played by Joel Lewis.  Is this guy not the next veteran character actor Kevin Dunn?  He even plays a part that had Kevin Dunn written all over it.  Dunn has roughly 100 more imdb credits than Lewis, so Lewis has a long way to go, but if he can get to that Dunn level, I gotta say he'll have had a pretty successful career, including work with three Oscar winning directors.  Here's to you Kevin Dunn, you're one of the great ones, and hopefully you'll get there someday too Joel Lewis.

All right, enough of that.  As of this posting, Fatal Call won't be out on DVD in US markets for about a month (July 23rd).  If you see it on Netflix or RedBox, I'd give it a look, especially if you're interested in some of the actors.  A nice little Noirish suspense flick that doesn't overdo the plot, and keeps a good action and tension quotient.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2059193/

The Devil's Tomb (2009)

My Netflix Instant Queue is a big void where movies available on Watch Instantly get dumped, often never to be seen again, at least until Netflix decides it wants to remove a film, and then I have to decide if I want to watch the movie before it gets the ax, or let it go and get it later on DVD. I almost never want to resort to the latter, so when this Cuba Gooding Jr. flick The Devil's Tomb was set to be removed, I bumped it up in the rotation to get it in and avoid having to use a DVD slot for it.

The Devil's Tomb has Gooding Jr. as the leader of some special ops wet-works team sent to extract Ron Perlman from some underground research facility in Afghanistan. When they get down there though, things aren't what they seem, as gross dudes with gross sores start coming out of the woodwork, quoting scripture and spitting black grossness on people. To make matters worse, Gooding's team start hallucinating. And then, Henry Rollins shows up, overacting more than a rapper in his first film role-- that might be the scariest thing of all...



I don't know, bad horror I guess, that's what this is, but not fun bad horror, more like dreary derivative bad horror. The religious bent made it even weirder. Gooding Jr., along with Perlman, and Ray Winstone in a small part, try their best to save this from blah-dom, but it was too much of an uphill battle. You've seen this before, and you've seen it better before.

This movie, perhaps more than any of Cuba Gooding Jr's DTV stuff we've done on here, really shows how much better an actor he is than the material he's forced to work with. If it wasn't for Perlman and Winstone, I would've felt really bad for him, but he had those two to share in his misery. Word on the street, if imdb is to be believed, Gooding is attached to a project called One in the Chamber, co-starring the Babe Ruth of DTV, Dolph Lundgren! I can't think of a better guy for Gooding to learn under as he gets the hang of this whole DTV thing-- of course, my posts are littered with mentions of upcoming projects that two or three years later I look back in the archives and am like "wow, that one never happened." Cross your fingers.



This is directed by Sean Connery's son. He didn't do a bad job, this just wasn't a really great or original concept, so it just was what it was. I don't even know if an assist from his dad could've saved it. Maybe, if they tweaked the script some, and had Gooding play an immortal from the Highlands of Scotland named Cuba MacLeod. "You can't die Macleod."

This had a few other recognizable names. Jason London, not to be confused with his twin brother Jeremy, Taryn Manning, and Henry Rollins were probably this biggest. I don't really know what to make of Henry Rollins, not just in this, but period. I know people who think he's the bee's knees, so maybe it's more me than it is him. I will say he was guilty of overacting in The Devil's Tomb, which meant I knew even less what to make of him.



I have a habit of calling Ron Perlman Bruce, I guess mixing him up with former Tennessee head basketball coach Bruce Pearl. I bet as I go back through this to proofread, I'll find some "Bruce Pearlmans" that need fixing-- and I may even miss some! I know upon seeing that the queue is starting with people wanting to hit me with the corrections comments: "you know, his name's RON, not BRUCE, duh!", and I could call him Ron for 90% of the post, but one Bruce, and boom, there's the comment letting me know.

All right, before I alienate all of my readers who scan my posts for brainfarts they can jump on-- hey, they still count as traffic and comments, so keep up the good work!-- I'll wrap this up. This film's days are numbered on Watch Instantly, but DVD is still an option, though I'm not so sure that's a good thing. Also, the Watch Instantly version was in full screen, but maybe this was originally Made for TV and no TV channel wanted it, as opposed to crammed into Pan and Scan from a widescreen cut. For our UK readers, our friend Lee Nicholson at Straight to DVD Heaven mentioned in the Sacrifice post that this finally came out on DVD over there. We wait for Seagal flicks, they wait for Cuba Gooding Jr. flicks, go figure.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1147687/