The Last Riders (1991)

For our PM review this month, we have this biker film starring Erik Estrada, along with William Smith, and a small early appearance by Mimi Lesseos. Those are the things I know about the film going in, it's what we get that we weren't expecting that make PM films so much fun! In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof and the guys at Comeuppance have covered this as well.

The Last Riders has Erik Estrada as the co-head of a biker gang (along with Angelo Tiffe), who, in trying to retrieve some stole drug money, kills the thieves, only to discover one of them is a dirty cop. Dirty or no, the full weight of the LAPD is coming for him, so he needs to give up his gang colors and go on the run. The first place he runs to is old buddy William Smith, who owns a garage in a small town in southern Nevada. He's happy to have Estrada work there and live in a trailer outside of town, and Estrada's happy to settle down, especially when a single mother (Kathrin Middleton) and her daughter (Minnie Madden) show up and need car repairs. But as he starts his new life, it wouldn't be a PM flick if his old life didn't come back to haunt him.

And boy does it come back to haunt him, which makes for an interesting movie story-wise. In most PM "hero's family is killed and now he's out for action-packed deadly revenge" movies, the family gets bumped off in the first act, and we don't get to know them too well, we just take it for granted that bumping off someone's family's bad, and then from there the hero starts the revenge process in the second act, and gives the baddie their ultimate comeuppance in the third act. Here, the first act is retrieving the drug money, and the second act is him falling in love with Middleton's character and starting a life with her, before she and her daughter are gunned down in the trailer. It's almost like the filmmakers were enjoying watching Estrada and Middleton's characters fall in love, and someone was like "hey guys, we need to get to the revenge part of this, the movie's almost over!" It creates that tonality issue we'd see a lot in early PM, where if you're watching this as a one-off in the early 90s because you found it on cable or at your local video store, you're probably not impressed, but in the context of a bunch of these you're excited to go along for the bonkers PM Entertainment ride. We also get some of the names we've come to know and love, like Cole S. McKay on stunts, Joseph Merhi directing, and Rick Pepin's cinematography. In that sense, you probably need to watch some of the better of these PM films before you get stuck in on this one, and even then, it's low on the list for me; but lower on the list PM is still not a bad way to kill 90 minutes if you're a PM Entertainment fan.

We're now at 58 PM flicks on the site, and what's interesting about this one, is it's their 22nd movie and came out in 1991, but feels like an earlier spine number joint from 1989 when they were still getting the hang of what PM would eventually be--which I guess isn't so crazy an idea when you consider 1989 and 1991 are only a couple years apart, there could be that overlap as they were still figuring out what worked best. And I'm not sure what the best PM moment in this was for me. Maybe when Estrada blows up the trailer with his deceased wife and step-daughter's bodies inside, while he and a tearful William Smith look on. No calling the cops, I imagine the Middleton's ex-husband would like to know what happened to his daughter, even if he was the jerkoff Middleton said he was, but nope, in the world of PM, the fiery funeral is all you need. From there, as he's getting his revenge, the bartender at their biker bar tells him she has feelings for him, and hey, he's back on the market now, even if the remaining embers of his dead wife and step-daughter's bodies are still smoldering near Lake Mead, why not go for it? And I guess that's what I think when I see another PM flick on Tubi, "come on, Matt, why not go for it?", because these things only work in the world of PM--and I don't even know if they work there either, or it's more the fact that they don't work that's so much fun.

One of the more fun aspects of the film was the band at the biker bar that performed over a couple of the montages. They were called The Sheilas, and their sound was in the mold of Pat Benatar's stuff, which is plenty fine for me. Even more fun, the first song featured a flautist. We're not strangers to the flute here at the DTVC, plenty of 80s exploitation films shot in the Philippines made ample use of the flute, perhaps because Italian directors thought jungles and flutes went together like peanut butter and chocolate, but we never actually saw the flautist getting after it like we do here. I never thought of it before, but yeah, a flute solo is exactly the music I need when I'm watching a shot of a biker gang back-angle parking their hogs against the curb. Now, if you're thinking flute music, Jethro Tull probably comes to mind, but can I throw out another name for you? Jazz flautist Ragan Whiteside is one of the best out there, in particular check out her cover of Little River Band's "Reminiscing," great stuff.

Corey Doctorow came up with the term "Enshittification" to describe how tech companies lock users in and then make their products as shitty as possible while extracting as much money out of them as they can. He's said on multiple appearances that he's okay with the term being used beyond the tech space, so I'm going to point out how this movie shows us the ways that so many things we took for granted in the early 90s have been enshittified now. Start with Las Vegas. In the early 90s it was a place where people with not a lot of money could go and have a fun time. Remember the Roseanne episode where she and Dan went with Tom Arnold and Sandra Bernhardt, and Roseanne got drunk and heckled Wayne Newton because she thought he was an impersonator? They ain't goin' to Vegas now, and even when I went in 2013 I could see it changing, nothing was cheap like it was in the early 90s, and in the 10+ years since, it's only gotten worse, as they'd rather cater to whales like Dana White compensating for inadequacies with six-figure blackjack hands than working-class stiffs looking to escape their troubles for a few days. From there, look at Estrada's job as a mechanic. The first thing William Smith would ask him today is, "how good are you with a computer?" And is Smith going to be able to pay him enough to support his new wife and step-daughter, even if they're living in a trailer by Lake Mead? Even Estrada going to the grocery store, it was like "oh man, the grocery store experience was so much nicer back then!" No memberships, no fugazi sales, Pepsi and ConAgra didn't own everything, Estrada paid a living wage so he can buy food, the grocery store workers paid a living wage too. Things aren't only worse now than they were in 1991, they're worse now by design, and have been for a while.

Finally, what the hell are we doing in that picture above? The cap, the mustache, the T-shirt, even the little cigar, and this guy is hanging out at a biker bar no less! You can't recreate this guy today, he'd either be dripping in irony, or imitated by a younger person who's still not generating the look organically. These weren't just decisions that were made in the morning as this man was leaving the house, these were completely legitimate decisions that no one he encountered that day would've looked askance at. And could there have been another beer that he'd be drinking other than Miller Lite? He's not quite what I would call a Cocaine Dad, which is a term I used for guys my dad's age who were born in the late 40s/early 50s, but when the late 80s/early 90s came, couldn't come to terms with the fact that they were getting older, so they pushed beyond their relevance and tried to look the part of someone ten years younger than them--and while they may not have all partaken in some nose candy, you wouldn't have put it past them either. This guy above has no use for terms like "relevance," he's completely authentic--I mean look at him, he's genuinely into the flautist performing her solo, even if he won't remember it tomorrow. Here's to you that guy in the picture above, you're one of the greats.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Tubi. As I said above, I think you'll get more enjoyment out of this after you've seen a lot of the better PM films first, but as a free streamer it does the trick.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102275

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

Midnight Warrior (1989)

For our PM review for April, I wanted to get this one in, because I had discussed it recently on an episode of the PM Entertainment Podcast, where I was part of a three-person weave along with host Jon Cross and Chris the Brain from Bulletproof Action. In addition to us, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance have covered this as well.

Midnight Warrior, aka "Mid-night Warr-ee-orr," stars Kevin Bernhardt as Nick Branca, a young Italian-American man who doesn't know how to eat spaghetti properly, but is great at finding provocative footage of news stories that he can sell to local TV stations for good money. One night as he's out chasing one of these stories, he saves a woman from a burning car after a PM-style crash. That makes him a hero, and everyone wants him to cover their stories now. The problem? Branca has found a nice girl from up the street named Angelina Mantucci (Lilly Melgar), and after a date or two he decides he wants to leave the Mid-night Warr-ee-orr life and settle down. His slimy boss Buddy (Bernie Angel) doesn't like the idea of his cash cow calling it quits, so he makes a decision on his own to do something to bring Branca back. But will this decision be his undoing?

We're do you go with this one? Great soundtrack? Check, as I'm writing this, I have the theme song in my head, which was just "Mid-night Warr-ee-orr" repeated as B-roll of LA at night flashed before us. Well-shot? For sure, Joseph Mehri's direction with Rick Pepin's cinematography was great. What about the acting? For the most part it worked--though poor Nonna in the extended family scene having to follow Bernhardt's all over the place card tricks and riffing for Rick Pepin's daughters was a tough spot to put her in. It's the story where we lose it I think. The premise was great, but early on we kind of don't know where it's going, then when we think we do, the rug is pulled out from under us in the kind of bonkers twist only PM could give us. We also get our PM car explosions and pizza joint owners getting shot through plate glass windows that mitigate any of the missteps. The fact that this would be number 2 on the spine if all the PM films were rereleased in original release order is a mark in its favor as well. If you've seen a lot of PM films, and you're looking for one to kill 90 minutes, I think this is a great choice.

This is our 57th PM film on the site, and I'd say if I were ranking them all, I'd put this in the bottom half. It's not horrible, but it's not one of those all-time PM classics either. As Jon, Chris, and I discussed on the PM pod, it seemed like the PM crew were still figuring things out, so this was the film where they learned to walk so later in the 90s they'd be able to drag Jack Scalia on a satellite dish from the back of a bread truck that's speeding down the highway. An interesting note on this, it's Joseph Mehri's 16th directing credit, which puts him one behind Fred Olen Ray for second all-time on the site, after Albert Pyun's 44ish (depending on how we count some of his films that were finished by someone else). That begs an interesting question: could he go into the Hall of Fame again? He and Richard Pepin are both in together as the P and M of PM Entertainment, and I only tag them separately for their directing work--which may not be fair to Pepin, because he did a lot of great cinematography work that he's not tagged for. Because my Hall of Fame is based off of sports halls of fame, I did some digging. The Baseball Hall of Fame says no, you only get inducted once, and that covers everything. The Basketball one on the other hand, does allow for multiple inductions, like in the case where a team was inducted, then allowing for an individual to be inducted as well. An example of this would be Michael Jordan, who was inducted as part of the Dream Team, and as an NBA player. So maybe not only Merhi, but Pepin as well should have their own individual inductions. It's worth considering.

The premise that this film was based on, "if it bleeds, it leads," was something that has only gotten worse in the intervening 30-plus years, not better. If you watch the news here in Philly, you'd think we were all living in RoboCop's Detroit or something; and the cable news phenomenon just exacerbated things even more. In 2016 Trump became the perfect "if it bleeds, it leads" president, where everything he did warranted a "breaking news" chyron at the bottom of the screen. None of the media outlets could handle it in 2020 when Biden was elected, the chyron looked silly when it was "Biden's dog bit one of his secret service detail." I guess that's the same as starting a coup to prevent a lawful transfer of power, tomato-tomahto, right? But this is what's fascinating about DTV films from this time, they may have missed the mark on a lot of Sci-Fi stuff, but they were spot on about a lot of socio-cultural stuff like this. The thing they couldn't have predicted though was OJ, he took what was happening in the late 80s/early 90s, and supercharged it. Bernie Angel would've had Bernhardt coming out of retirement to follow OJ during the Bronco Chase. And had it been PM, the Bronco would've flipped through a police car barricade, only for Bernhardt to save OJ before it exploded.

Usually this paragraph would be a round-up of all the other cast and crew, but because there weren't many other people to discuss, I thought I'd use it as a round-up of all the other bonkers moments I missed. First, near the beginning, we find out that Bernie Angel's character's base of operations is a diner. He has his own circular booth, with TVs plugged in via extension cords, and all manner of papers and documents strewn about. Even in 1989, who did that? Even in a café today, they'd see that and say "um, no... no, you can't do that here." Later, our hero visits his mom, who makes him some pasta. When he meets the neighbor lady, his face is covered in red sauce, like he'd never eaten pasta in his life, or forgot how to use a fork to put food in his mouth. After he saves the woman from the burning car, a local TV reporter goes to his house so they can hook up. When he gets home though, he doesn't know who's there, he just sees clothes lying around and hears the shower get turned on. His first thought is it's his mother visiting. What? Does his mother use his shower a lot? And does she leave her clothes lying around too? I mentioned above about poor Nonna. I have no idea what that was, it was some extended family thing that Bernhardt's character and Melgar's character were attending, but whose family was it, his or hers? And why was he doing a magic trick for Rick Pepin's kids? Then he finishes by having Nonna do some, while he hits on Melgar's character, and the best Nonna can think to do is sing a song from the Old World. Your guess was as good as mine. Finally, when our hero and the neighbor lady are back at his place, she mentions wanting a dog, and his response is to go on this soliloquy about why he prefers birds. It was so fantastic, Jon created a shirt for it that you can buy on the PM Entertainment Podcast Threadless page. I've been meaning to get one myself!

Finally, look at that image above. Do you see the "Bo Knows" ad in the upper right corner? As a kid in the late 80s, it didn't get any better than Bo Jackson. I'd watch This Week in Baseball and couldn't wait to see what Bo Jackson highlights they had for us, like when he tried to call time out then hit a home run anyway when the ump wouldn't grant it; or when he threw Harold Reynolds out at home on a play he had no business making. His time with the Raiders I didn't see as much, because the late afternoon AFC game was usually blacked out after the Patriots were on in the early window, so we always had the CBS NFC game in that window, but I remember the highlights of him trucking Brian Bosworth to get a touchdown. As a running back, he threw his body into defenders like he had a spare at home in the closet, so it probably wasn't so much that he got injured and it cut his career short as much as he managed to not get injured for so long despite playing like that. Either way, he was a force, and we may never see anyone like him again. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can stream this on Fawesome here in the States, plus there's a decent version on YouTube which is included in my PM Entertainment playlist, which you can find on our DTVC YouTube channel. And also don't forget to check out the episode we did on the PM Entertainment Podcast!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145082

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

To Be the Best (1993)

In 2026 I've decided to start something that I started last month without realizing I was starting it, and that's reviewing one PM for the first post of every month. That means we'll have at least 12 PM flicks reviewed this year. Not a bad deal, and I figured for our first one I'd do one I'd been meaning to do forever, which also has an exploding helicopter, so I can tick that off the list too. In addition to us, the PM Podcast covered this, plus Toyman at Bulletproof, and Karl Brezdin at First of the B-List.

To Be the Best is about a kickboxing/martial arts tournament, where the US team is one of many entrants, and their biggest competitor is the Thai team, composed of residents from the Bangkok Chinatown. The coach of the US team is former disgraced fighter Rick Kulhane (Martin Kove) and his two sons Sam (Phillip Troy Linger--and no, he didn't have to let it) and Eric (Michael Worth), who is the team's best fighter. The problem is the evil Alex Cord is hanging around, and he has $500,000 on the Thai team's best fighter Hong Do (Steven Vincent Leigh), and to make sure his bet comes in, he's threatening Eric's girlfriend (Brittney Powell). Will Eric throw the big fight?

This does exactly what you want PM to do, except the middle is a bit draggy, which we'll get to in a second. It starts with some underground fighting, where a man who's a cross between a poor man's Nick Vallelonga and a poor man's Johnny Roast Beef tries to get Worth to throw the fight, and when he doesn't, to show Worth he means business, he has his helicopter pilot take Worth for a ride, hanging him from a cord while he flies him around Vegas. The pilot gets a little too into it though, and crashes into one of the hotels, causing Worth to go flying into one of the suites. It's as amazing as it gets, only to be followed up in the next scene by another underground fight in LA that gets broken up by the police, leading to a two-pronged chase with one set of cops chasing some guys in a white car, and another chasing Linger (which he didn't have to let it) on a dirt bike. The problem was, the movie couldn't keep that kind of energy up, and things bog down a bit with some sparring montages, broken up by a nice bowling alley fight, and then it's just a tournament film, until the end, which is another fantastic group of great action set pieces to finish things off. I think where that leaves us, is this is a great time, and while it's maybe only a top 30 PM flick for me, that's still going to be a fun way to spend your 90 minutes.

We're now at 54 PM films, and this is one of those ones where you'd think it would've been done sooner, but for some reason it kept getting pushed back, and I think the only reason I bumped it up to now is the fact that it has an exploding helicopter, so I can chip away at my paltry number on Exploding Helicopter's Letterboxd list. And what a thing of beauty that helicopter explosion is, and while the movie isn't able to maintain that energy throughout, the fact that had it at all is why we come to PM films. This is also number 58 for Art Camacho, who's not only fight coordinator, but he plays one of the US team as a character named "Runt"--which at no point is that expounded upon, that's just the name they gave him. Definitely in 2026 he'll be our fourth member of the 60 Club. We're also seeing Martin Kove again for the first time since VFW in 2024. He's at 19 now, so we'll see if we get him past 20 this year. And then for our stunt coordinators, this film features the duo of Red Horton and "Broadway" Joe Murphy, with the former as second-unit director, and the latter stunt coordinator. They're at 17 and 16 films respectively, which I think are numbers we'll see get bigger as we do more PM flicks.

Two names that are finally getting tags are Michael Worth and Vince Murdocco. Neither have big numbers--five for Worth, 11 for Murdocco--but they both were such a big part of 90s DTV action, especially these PM flicks, that the tagging was overdue--especially if Ian Jacklin's been tagged, because they inhabit a similar space, though to Jacklin's credit, he has more tags than either of them with 13. Worth is the star in this one, and I think there's a sense that maybe PM was positioning him to do more stuff like this, but this ended up being his last film with them, I think due to him making Fists of Iron, which I believe no one that worked on that other than Art Camacho did another film for PM--Matthias Hues hadn't worked with them before, and Richard Munchkin only did some LA Heat and Hollywood Safari episodes. Murdocco is something else. Just saying "it also has Murdocco" evokes a sense of a certain kind of low-budget 90s actioner, and while that movie is often also a PM film, after 1994's Magic Kid II, he doesn't do any other films for them either, but he also wasn't a part of Fists of Iron, so I don't know if it was due to any kind of issues with PM. They may just not have had a place for him as they moved into different movies and got bigger names. I guess I get it, but how could you not have a place for Murdocco?

What the hell is going on in that image below? Are we looking at a potential 10.0 Mulletude mullet? Sure, the business on top is a little more manager at a hardware store business than you'd want, but the party in the back is almost Sunset Strip hair band rager--probably more like backstage afterparty at a Midwestern tour stop for a hair band, and maybe not the headliner like Poison, but an opening band like Trixter or Hurricane--but I'm quibbling on something that at least has to be a 9.8 on the Mulletude scale, and spending way too much time explaining why I'm deducting two tenths of a point, instead of basking the beauty that is that fantastic ape drape. And the thing is, it comes at a time when I'm not sure what's happening with this movie because it's mired in a bunch of fights and intrigue around Alex Cord being a dick, but then I finally get my shot of the Vegas Strip McDonald's so I can tag that, and then boom, I'm hit in the face that with Hall of Fame caliber mullet, and it's just all Tiger Woods on the 18th hole birdie fist pumps from there. I went back through our old posts, and saw that I gave the Barbarian Brothers a 9.8 for their mullets in Double Trouble, and I guess that's because they're more workman-like and added to the overall Barbarian Brothers charm, but that means I either need to go back and drop that rating, or bring this one up a tad. 9.9 sounds too high for this mullet, even as amazing as it is, so maybe the Barbarians need to go down to 9.5 or so.

Finally, one of the elements running through the film is Martin Kove's character's love of the LA Raiders. I'm sure it was just tossed in, but based on his character's age and when the team moved from Oakland, it wouldn't make a lot of sense that he'd root for them, unless there was some kind of quirk in his character or special unique reason for it, neither of which was mentioned. Being born in the late 40s, if he's from LA he'd have grown up with the LA Rams as his team, because the Oakland Raiders didn't move to LA until 1980, when he would've been in his 30s. To give you a history of NFL football in LA would give you a popsicle headache, but if you're not familiar with the league, you could look the NFL up on Wikipedia and find there are no Raiders in LA, the two LA teams are the Rams and the Chargers, but there is a Las Vegas Raiders. Two years after this film was released, the Raiders went back to Oakland, one year after the Rams moved to St. Louis, leaving the second largest city in the US without an NFL team, until the Rams moved back to LA in 2016, and the San Diego Chargers moved to LA one year later; and then in 2020 the Raiders moved from Oakland to Las Vegas. (I'm sorry, I said I wasn't going to get into it, and I did anyway, so hopefully the popsicle headache wasn't too horrible.) My point is, Kove's character should've been a Rams fan, but it's kind of more PM-ish that he rooted for the Raiders instead.

And with that, let's wrap this up. The Roku Channel has this, but when I watched it the audio wasn't synched, so I watched it on YouTube instead, which was fine. However you watch it, it's a solid addition to your PM experience, and one you should definitely check out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108346

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

Repo Jake (1990)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magic Kid (1993)

I knew I needed to get more PM on the site, and I also knew I was two movies away from getting Don "The Dragon" into the 40 Club, so I figured this wouldn't be a bad one to cover. Luckily it was on YouTube, because what Pluto lists as this one, is actually the sequel. In addition to us, Chris DePetrillo at Bulletproof has covered this as well.

Magic Kid has Ted Jan Roberts as a 13-year-old martial arts prodigy from Michigan who, with his sister (Shonda Whipple), goes to LA to stay with their uncle (Stephen Furst) and his girlfriend (Sandra Kerns) when their parents (Lauren Tewes and Chris Mitchum) need to get rid of them for a few weeks. Turns out Uncle Flounder's an alcoholic inveterate gambler who's into mob boss Joe Campanella for 10 large, but when they come to collect, Roberts beats the crap out of them. Now the mob is out for blood, so upstanding Uncle Flounder has them running around LA while he figures out what to do, subjecting Roberts's 15-year-old sister to all kinds of adult males hitting on her, and needing Roberts to get them out of various jams. Who knows, maybe The Dragon can help?

This is as ridiculous as it sounds, but has this nice amount of PM that gets it over the goal line. Maybe not as many explosions or car flips, but plenty of fight scenes, where Roberts takes all manner of stunt guys and kicks, punches, and throws them into bodies of water, through panes of glass, and over balconies--and among those stunt guys we have Red Horton and Broadway Joe Murphy, the stunt coordinating team responsible for PM classics Zero Tolerance and T-Force, so it was nice to see Roberts throw them into pools or off balconies too. We also had Art Camacho as not only fight choreographer, but he played Roberts's sensei and hosted the tournament in "Michigan" that led the movie. There were some odd parts about the film, like how it was normalized that adult men were hitting on a 15-year-old girl, or how much of a degenerate Furst's character was despite being responsible for a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old, but when you see that PM logo, and see Wilson appearing as a version of himself, combined with Roberts as a fun hero, it just kinda works.

We're officially at 39 films for Wilson on the site. I say "officially" because we'd had to remove a couple tags due to some erroneous IMDb credits that have since disappeared. Part of the reason why he's taken a little longer than other DTV stars to hit that mark, is, like myself, he went on a bit of a hiatus, only the end of his in 2015 happened to coincide with the start of mine. Even as we're catching up, none of those newer ones other than New York Ninja really feature him in the lead the way his 90s stuff did, and while this movie only has him in a small part in the beginning--appearing in Roberts's dream no less--a smaller part in the middle, and then a nice fight sequence with Roberts at the end, it's more what his character represents here, that 90s action star that we all loved watching, and whose stuff from that time is still iconic. For all of us, he'll always be "The Dragon," and it was great to see him as "The Dragon" in this.

This is our third Ted Jan Roberts film on the site, after Hollywood Safari (which also has Wilson, and at that time was the last of his known DTV films that I had to review) and A Dangerous Place, so out of his six PM flicks, we're half-way through. It's interesting how PM tried to split the difference with him here. They had a young, martial arts prodigy, and at the same time there was this spate of martial arts films directed at kids, so they must've thought the mix was gold, the only problem was, PM weren't great alchemists. They tried to make Roberts the hero in a kids movie, but they didn't know how to pull it off tonally. For example, I mentioned adult males hitting on Shonda Whipple's character, who, even though in real life she was 19--which was weird enough for guys in their 30s to be hitting on her--was supposed to be 15. In one scene a bunch of surfers on Santa Monica Pier are hitting on her, and Sandra Kerns says "guys, the lady said no." What? "The lady said no"? The lady is 15! How about that be the reason they need to back off? There's another scene where Uncle Flounder has the kids sleeping on the beach to avoid the mob. And he even had the audacity to expect them to share a sleeping bag while he had his own. They refuse to let him get away with that at least, and force him to sleep without a sleeping bag, but still, it was a rough deal. And just the whole premise, a man who's almost 40 expecting a 13-year-old to beat up adult mob bosses that are after him for betting money he didn't have. I don't know that they got much better at this by 1997's Hollywood Safari either, but I think it's fascinating just the same that they were trying it.

Speaking of the 40 Club, we had two other members in this film, PM Entertainment in their 45th film on the site, and Art Camacho in his 54th. Also, this was directed by Joseph Merhi, the 13th film he's directed on the site, moving him into a four-way tie for third most among directors. What was interesting though were the other stars. Lauren Tewes as the mother was great. What a great get to have Julie, our cruise director, in a PM flick! Also I see that she was born in Braddock, PA, which is where John Fetterman was mayor, someone who is now known for one of the great heel-turns in politics. And then we had Stephen Furst, aka Flounder from Animal House, as the uncle. He does his best here, but because things were so tonally all over the place, it was a tough sled. Despite that, he came back to direct the sequel one year later. Finally, for Charles in Charge fans, we had Sandra Kerns, who never made another film after this, instead focusing on raising her kids in Pacific Pallisades. I guess if this was it for her acting career, this isn't a horrible way to go out.

Finally, we usually dedicate this paragraph to something silly or offbeat about me personally, but considering this film was shot in LA, I think it's important to mention the wildfires and the people affected--including potentially Sandra Kerns, if she and her family still live in Pacific Pallisades, we hope they're all okay. We watch so many films, especially from the 90s, that were shot in LA, it's a part of the world that for decades has invited us into the space where they live for our entertainment, but times like these remind us that people make their homes there, and like any of us, take for granted that that home will always be there. Our hearts go out to everyone affected by these fires, and hope everyone is okay. And God forbid you do need to evacuate, for God's sake, leave your keys in your car in case Steven Guttenberg needs to move it. For people reading who want to help, this CNBC article shows you charities that have been vetted, and how to spot scams: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/09/california-wildfire-relief-where-to-give.html

And with that, let's wrap this up. YouTube is your best bet right now, unless you can find a cheap DVD or VHS. This is more for PM or Don "The Dragon" Completists, of which I'm a card-carrying member of both, and if you are too, or either just one or the other, this will get you to the church on time.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107482

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Night of the Wilding (1990)

We finish up our DTVC Hall of Fame inductions with, you guessed it, Spiro Razatos! Wait, you thought it was Erik Estrada? I guess I can see where you might have thought that. Anyhow, in addition to us, our friends Ty and Brett at Comeuppance have covered this one as well.

Night of the Wilding is an early PM flick starring Erik Estrada as a defense attorney, the best in the business who never loses and sometimes wears crop-tops in his off hours. After a group of teenagers out on a night of "wilding" crash a party a clerk at a grocery store is having and beat and rape her and her friend, the rich parents hire Estrada to defend them. This presents a problem, because the prosecutor is his ex-wife. He pulls all the bad tricks you'd expect a sleazy defense attorney to do, from victim blaming and shaming to acting like the "wilding" kids were lured into a den of iniquity by a couple of "loose" women, making them the victims. Just when we think it can't get any worse, the prosecutor uses herself as bait to draw the boys out, and now Estrada has to help her, even if it means losing his clients. 

This is a fun one. It is early PM, so the action isn't exactly what you want--more on that in a second when we get to Spiro Razatos--but it does deliver in the great early 90s nostalgia ways you'd want, from the fashions to the dialog, and for me that does the trick. Estrada is great as well, plus we have a small role by Joey Travolta, meaning he did both this and the AIP "wilding" movie. Similar to Bad Ass, this is also ripped from the headlines, drawing from the Central Park Five case at that time, this one follows the same playbook of removing the racial element by having the attackers be three rich white kids. As we know now, the Central Park Five were all exonerated after it was discovered they were falsely accused, but the furor that was stoked at the time surrounding themes like violence by teens, violence by young blacks, violence in New York, and violence against women, led to not only movies like this one, but also the Central Park Five being falsely convicted and losing 13 years of their lives. What we get here, in true PM style, is part ripped from the headlines, but also part plot that veers off course into a series of other killings, leading to a great foot chase, and then a sudden car flip. That's one thing that is great about PM, something that in 1990 that was supposed to be playing on exaggerated fears the public had based on narratives around stories ripped from the headlines, can now be enjoyed for the schlock early 90s movie it's become over the past 30 years.

You might be wondering, why this the film for Spiro Razatos's induction? And you'd be right in wondering that, as he really only does some stunt work here. The thing is, among his PM work, we've done all his greats except for Pure Danger, which I wasn't able to find. There were some others, like Extreme Justice and Maniac Cop 2, that he was action director on that I could've done instead, but I've also really wanted to do this film for some time too, so I figured it was good enough since he did do stunt work on it. I first got wind of who he was when I read an interview Gary Daniels did where mentioned him when they did Recoil together. As I dug deeper I discovered how big of a deal he is, especially now where he's action director on huge blockbusters like the Fast and Furious series; but not only that, he's responsible for a lot of the films that made PM as great as they are. The Sweeper, Recoil, Riot, Rage, and Last Man Standing, plus non-PM classics like One Man Force. With the vital role he played in making 80s and 90s action what we know it as, it was really more that I should've gotten him in sooner, and the only reason I didn't was due to my own ignorance. As we induct him here, this will be his 26th tag, so not quite 30 Club, but I imagine it'll be soon for him. Truly one of the all-time greats.

What is Erik Estrada wearing here? That crop top is fantastic. What you can't tell from the screen is he also has his reading glasses on. Rich attorneys with mansions in Bel Air always wear crop tops and reading glasses, don't they? At least they did in the early 90s, when it was a simpler, nicer time. Here in Philly, there's a movement to get a subway extension along the Roosevelt Boulevard corridor, and the person leading the movement is selling shirts for it, including a crop top version. In one of the pictures, a guy was wearing it, which I guess is more evidence that if you live long enough you'll see fashions come back that you never thought would--like today when I passed a kid wearing a Von Dutch trucker hat. We've seen a little bit more Estrada than we usually do on here lately, with us covering the two Andy Sidaris films he did as well. I think when I started the site I expected him to be a bigger part of it, but it didn't happen unfortunately, and I don't know when we'll see him again on here. Hopefully soon, but if not, we love you Mr. Estrada, crop tops and reading glasses and all.

PM is now at 42 films on the site, and according to IMDb, I think this is their 11th film, so it really is an early one. There are still elements of action there, especially at the end when we get a car flip seemingly out of nowhere, but it has more of the suspenseful storytelling around it that was a hallmark of some of those early ones, like the ones Wings Hauser did. This one also had the classic pairing of Joseph Merhi as director and Richard Pepin as DP. Of all the great director/DP pairings ever, for DTV action fans this might be the most iconic. While I say this is early PM, it's only a year later that we get to Ring of Fire, the PM take on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and something that we think of as a classic PM flick, so that "early period" really only lasted a couple years before they were "PM Fuckin' Entertainment," and then I think they start their peak in '94 with Zero Tolerance, and that wave builds through T-Force, Hologram Man, Last Man Standing, into the Gary Daniels "three Rs," The Sweeper, and Skyscraper, giving us some of the greatest DTV actioners ever. You can also see the wave cresting at the same time as they started the LA Heat TV show in '97. We still get some greats after that, like the last of the Daniels three Rs, Recoil, and The Underground with Jeff Fahey, but nothing like the volume of that peak period. And that's what makes that peak period so astounding, the volume of great films they put out in such a short time, and when I think of a movie like this one as part of their "early period," it really drives home how short that peak period was.

Finally, it's been a while (cue the Staind lyrics) since we've had a McDonald's sighting at the DTVC. I used to make a point of showing them all the time, and have finally decided to tag them. I tried a search of my site, and if it's accurate, the last time we posted was in May of 2011, with Mutant Zombie Vampires from the Hood, which also featured a McDonald's from LA. Sorting out the films where I just mentioned McDonald's, I think this is the 11th film with a McDonald's sighting in it--I didn't count Toxic Avenger, which features a classic McDonald's Styrofoam container, but doesn't show an actual McDonald's as far as I know. 11 tags, does that mean sometime down the road McDonald's could be inducted into the Hall of Fame? Honestly, I don't eat there as much anymore, not because I'm above it or anything, but because all the Center City locations here in Philly have closed, as have the South Philly ones along Broad Street. I'd have to walk ten blocks to the nearest one, which isn't horrible, but why do that? One funny thing is there used to be one on Walnut Street, and Google Maps still shows it as open, despite the fact that the building has been completely torn down, so I guess people order from there still and it causes a mess for delivery drivers.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now you can get this on YouTube, and the version isn't horrible. Hopefully someday a company like Vinegar Syndrome, or maybe even Mill Creek, will put all of PM's flicks on Blu-ray, or maybe Tubi will get more of them so we can at least stream a decent copy, but until then, this YouTube version will work. And again, here's to you Spiro Razatos, one of the best to do it, we action fans are forever in your debt.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100259

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

 

Executive Target (1997)

It's been a little while since we've last had PM on the site, back in February when they joined the 40 Club. With that in mind, I'd had this as one of theirs I'd been meaning to look at for a while now. Beyond the PM factor, we had one of my favorites Michael Madsen, plus DTVC Hall of Famer Matthias Hues, and greats like Keith David and Roy Scheider. In addition to us, out of the six critic reviews on IMDb, three of them are the guys at Comeuppance, Will at Exploding Helicopter, and Simon at Explosive Action, so that tells you this has to be pretty sweet.

Executive Target has Madsen as a stunt driver serving time in prison who's broken out by a terrorist group while he's being transported. The terrorist group, led by Keith David, and featuring Angie Everhart, Matthias Hues, and Robert Miano among their members, want Madsen to drive for them, and to make sure he does, they kidnap his wife (Kathy Christopherson). First he drives for them in a bank heist, and then the real fun begins: they want him to kidnap the President, none other than Roy Scheider. But Madsen has other plans, and while he does kidnap the President, he takes him to a friend's place, and together they hatch a plan to take David and his baddies down. No matter what, in PM fashion it'll be all car flips and explosions to get us there.

PM does it again. Even at 100 minutes, which would be death for many other films, for PM it's just an extra ten minutes of car flips, explosions, Madsen being too cool for school, David chewing scenery as the baddie, and Scheider being bad ass Presidential. As Simon said in his review on Explosive Action: "this is why I got into this game." Here here. They really don't make 'em like this anymore, but PM made 'em like this back then, and we have them available on streaming sites or YouTube for us to enjoy. And it's classic PM too. When we hear bank heist, we know this can't be a simple smash and grab job, and PM gives us the chase we want. Plus it's the 90s, when we see Madsen on the tin it means he's really going to be in the film, not like today where he might be in for like 10 or 20 minutes. This probably isn't even a top 20 PM flick for me, but that's how great PM was back then that this is so entertaining.

I went back to look at the previous 12 Madsen films we'd looked at to see where this ranked, and it might be the best of his we've done. We have a great performance by him in Vice, and then Final Combination aka Dead Connection is probably the other one I'd consider for the best of his we've covered, but I think that one loses itself a bit in the end, whereas this is consistently PM throughout. Recently we did Dolph's 69th film, and there was a thought of who could catch him. Madsen has the credits, but with this only being his 13th film on the site, he's now 56 behind Dolph, so even if we did one Madsen film a week for a year, he'd still be behind Dolph. The thing is though, I looked on Tubi, and he has like 90 or 100 films on there, and while some are ones we've done before, or they're not DTV flicks so they wouldn't fit on the site, there are at least 60 we could do. Back when I used to do 3 posts a week, that would be feasible, but now that I barely do 60 posts a year it's harder to pull off. Another one we could do that with is Eric Roberts, who has 180+ films on Tubi. So if we did a movie a week for each of them, it would be like a George Thorogood song, "one Madsen, one Roberts, and one beeeeer..."

This is the second time we've seen Roy Scheider play the president on the site, the other being Dolph's The Peacekeeper--and he has another in addition to that, 2000's Chain of Command, which I haven't reviewed yet. Of all the people we've had play the President on here, he might be the most Presidential. Ty and I joke on the podcast about Randall Emmett convincing Donald Trump to play a baddie in some of their movies, but this Scheider performance has me thinking Biden would be one of the best badass Presidents the way Scheider is here, as he seems very Biden-ish. Maybe the best badass ever would be Teddy Roosevelt. Eisenhower was pretty badass too. And don't sleep on George Washington. And while I'm not sure if Bill Clinton would've made a great action star, at least he could play the sax if he was taking Busey's role in a shot-by-shot remake of Bulletproof--and who wouldn't pay to hear Bill Clinton call people "butthorns"?

Usually the film's Hall of Famers are covered in the first paragraph after my initial reaction, but Matthias Hues is barely in this, and I wanted to save my PM paragraph for the penultimate one, so here we are. This is now 19 for Hues, so he's about to pass 20, which doesn't sound like a lot, but as a Hall of Famer, we'd like to get that count higher, so hitting that milestone would be important. According to the trivia, he asked Merhi to be killed off, which may explain the scant Hues we got. We had Keith David as well, this is only 9 for him, but fun to see him acting opposite Madsen, two greats getting after it. We finally tagged Angie Everhart with this being her third film on the site. I'm expecting we'll see her more though, especially with the number of DTV films she did around this time, including more PM flicks. As someone known for her great hair, in this her character has it in a ponytail for good chunks of the film, so it's almost a hair bait-and-switch, though to be fair, we can't really see her hair on the cover, so they didn't sell us on her hair going in, just had us expect it on reputation alone.

Finally, I saved the PM paragraph for last. This is our 41st PM flick we've looked at on the site. The goal is to get as many, if not all, of PM's feature films reviewed on here. According to IMDb, they list 202 titles, of which 48 are LA Heat episodes, so that leaves us with 154, minus the 41 we've already done, so 113 or so to go? That seems pretty daunting--maybe instead of a Madsen project I should do a PM flick every week. A lot of them are available either on streaming sites, or YouTube--in fact, on my YouTube page, I've created a playlist of the PM flicks I've found so far on there. I think at the very least, the action films need to be on here, and there are still a ton of those that need to be covered too. I think what watching this film does is reminds me that, while newer films are good to cover, I should never go too long without covering something from this time, especially a PM flick, because there isn't much happening today that matches what they did back then. Maybe Jesse V. Johnson or Isaac Florentine, but neither of them are doing what PM did at the scale and absurdity we see in something like this. Here's to you PM, you were one of the greatest. As I always say, you don't need the "entertainment" in their name, because when we see "PM," the "entertainment" is a given.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Right now YouTube is the best way to check this out, though Amazon has used VHS and DVD at good prices. This is pure PM, with solid Madsen, great explosions and car chases, and a fun supporting cast. Maybe they don't make 'em like this anymore, but they did back then, and we have the means to watch them now.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119088

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

L.A. Heat (1989)

In my desire to get more Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs on the site, we ended up hitting a milestone as well. PM Entertainment becomes the seventh member of the 40 Club with this post. With the kind of contributions they've made to the world of DTV action, it's much deserved. This is also a complete the triangle review, as Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, and Mitch at the Video Vacuum have covered this as well.

L.A. Heat has LHJ as a cop who's kind of on the edge, but has never fired his weapon on the job--which for most cops is common, but for a cop in a PM film it's absurd. So as his partners get killed off by Clarence, a cop-killing drug dealer, LHJ needs to pull out all the stops. That includes working with a drug dealer named Spyder, who also has a bone to pick with Clarence, but then when a mob boss named Sylvio also gets involved, all bets are off for LHJ, and the lack of results gets him kicked off the force. Will he be able to pull himself out of his doldrums and get his cat to stop eating his food in time to get up off the mat and take these guys down?

For a PM flick, this isn't the best, but it's not the worst. As an early PM flick though, it's fun to see how they're not quite there yet as a studio, but they're getting there. We get shootouts that are good, but not PM good. The car chases are scant, and lack the volume of car flippage later PM will have, but we can see how they'll build off of these. LHJ does what you need him to as a cop on the edge, plus I liked that they dealt with issues in how the police treat people of color in LA prior to Rodney King in a way that wasn't afraid to tell it like it is. This also had a heavy Beverly Hills Cop vibe, with a lot of the action scenes accompanied by a strong "Axel F"-esque synth score, which was fun for me to listen to. The action isn't at the volume or as inspired as what we'd see later on in the 90s from PM, and I think if we're comparing this to that standard, few DTV actioners meet that; but as studio that was still hitting its stride, and as someone who fancies himself a DTV Connoisseur, watching this knowing what PM would eventually become, I enjoyed what we had here.

Our first PM review was back in May of 2007, very early in our history, when I reviewed the Van Damme film Inferno aka Desert Heat, which I didn't know at the time was a PM flick, and which also featured Danny Trejo giving Van Damme a foot massage. We've come a long way with PM since then, as we've added reviews of some of the films they've made that bolstered up the tail end of golden age of DTV action. When we think of that '85 to '95 window where DTV action was so fantastic, '90 to '95 was almost all PM when it comes to the best of that period, and the stuff they did in the late 90s did a lot to extend that golden age a bit further. The things that we came to know PM for, the car chases with cars flipping and exploding all over the place, the inspired fight scenes with accomplished martial artists, and the stunt work that was next level, all came after this film, but you could see the seeds of it planted in this movie. Truly one of the greats, PM not only deserves to finally join the 40 Club, but with so many more PM films left to review, the 40 Club is just the start.

This is now our 4th LHJ flick on the site, but this is only the second one starring him, after Quiet Fire, another PM joint. What I liked about him here, is he was the cop on the edge, but when he was with his love interest, he was able to show the humor and charisma he had when he was on Welcome Back Kotter. I don't think we got enough of that in Quiet Fire, but it was fun to see here. In looking at his IMDb bio, he has some more PM flicks from around this early period of theirs, but other than some voice work in '93's Firepower, after Quiet Fire in '91 he really doesn't do anything more, but that is 4 more PM flicks of his between this and Quiet Fire that I need to cover, so we'll see more of him on here. Future Hall of Famer? I don't know if he'll have the numbers to get there, but I think his work in this early PM period is important enough to maybe consider it if we do get the numbers, because he does have other work beyond PM that we could do too.

You may have noticed that Joseph Merhi has been tagged for this post, but not Richard Pepin. Currently I'm only tagging one or the other of them for the films they've directed. The thinking behind that is that the PM Entertainment tag covers their work as producers, and PM Entertainment's Hall of Fame induction and now 40 Club entry covers their contributions to the world of DTV action. The thing is though, Richard Pepin was director of photography on this, and for anyone else, like say an Art Camacho or Isaac Florentine, that would be enough to get them another tag. With that in mind, it's possible that both could get a bunch more tags for any work they did on a film beyond producer--or if they were a producer on a non-PM film. This is an issue we've also run into with another producing team, Golan and Globus, and in their case they actually have their own tag separate from Cannon films, but they also don't have the 100% overlap with Cannon that Merhi and Pepin have with PM films--currently Cannon has more than Golan-Globus. Anyway, with his 10th director tag on here, Merhi joins an exclusive club of directors with 10 or more tags, which starts with Albert Pyun and his (I believe) 43, then Fred Olen Ray with 15, Isaac Florentine (I believe) and Sam Firstenberg with 13, Keoni Waxmen, Fred Williamson, and Art Camacho with 11, and then Cirio H. Santiago who also has 10. That makes Merhi the 9th to join the ten director tags club, which is almost as exclusive as the 40 Club, but also almost as exclusive as the 30 Club for just acting tags, which I believe is 8 right now. If you're wondering, Pepin is at 7 directing credits, so he's knocking on the door as well.

Finally, I want to go back to PM's enduring legacy as we celebrate this milestone of theirs. As Cannon starts to fade out in the early 90s, PM comes in and picks up the ball at that same time, filling our video store shelves and cable TV line-ups with fun actioners loaded with high-octane stunts and action effects that we don't really see on the same level with DTV actioners today. The 90s wouldn't be the 90s without their contributions, and I don't know that a site like mine would exist at the level it does without their films. While some of their movies are available to stream, ones like this are only available on low-quality YouTube uploads, which, don't get me wrong, are better than nothing, but for what PM brought, it all should be available for everyone to consume either on Tubi, or later with nice Blu-rays from companies like Vinegar Syndrome. Maybe with an LA Heat it's a boxed set of this and the sequels--and yes, this film isn't the great PM stuff that they would later be known for, but it is also nice to watch it and see where that whole thing was headed. When we compare the 90s with the 2000s, and later the 2010s, PM is a big part of why those later two decades don't come close in the sheer volume of fun DTV action classics, and it would be good if more of those classics were available in a better physical medium. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. As far as I can tell, YouTube is the best way to go to catch this as of this writing. Used VHS or DVD might also be a possibility if you stumble upon it, but Amazon won't be much help, as it confuses this title with the PM TV series of the same name. There are a lot more PM flicks out there that are better than this, but as an early PM entry that gives you a sense of where this is all headed, it can be a fun sit.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097699

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

Final Impact (1992)

I had always thought I'd reviewed this one before, but when I was putting together my Gary Daniels list on Letterboxd, I realized that that not only wasn't the case, but I hadn't even seen it. It was something I needed to rectify as soon as possible, which I'm doing now. In addition to me, this has also been covered by Comeuppance Reviews, Movies in the Attic, the Video Vacuum, and Fist of the B-List, so you can check out their sites to see what they all think. Also, if you haven't already, check us out on Letterbox. We have lists on movies we want to see, ones we have queued up to review, and lists like the Gary Daniels and Dolph Lundgren lists.

Final Impact is a PM Entertainment flick with Lamas as an old fighter who loses a big match and opens a strip club/fighting ring after. When the Ohio State Champ, Michael Worth, shows up and wants him to train him, Lamas thinks this kid has what it takes to beat Jake, the guy that took him down years ago.

This is what I'm talking about right here. Maybe it could have used more fighting, but beyond that it's just a fun PM Entertainment flick. Lamas is great in the lead, Worth does his part as the young upstart, and Kinmont holds the whole thing together. At the same time, there's plenty of stuff you can get a kick out of, like Lamas's fight with Jake at the Neon Graveyard in Las Vegas; or even the idea of the oil wrestling/strip club/karate club that Lamas runs, which, to be honest would actually be kind of a cool idea if it weren't for the state boxing commissions and the fact that people could die if they got a bad concussion in one of the fights. Now I'm meandering and it's only the third paragraph.

We haven't seen DTVC Hall of Famer Lorenzo Lamas since 2012, and I don't know about you, but I've missed him. I was going through some of the old posts, and at one time he was second to Dolph with the most. While he's still one of only 6 actors in the 30 Club, he's now only tied with Rothrock for the fifth most. I think for an indication of why, we can go back to the last film of his we'd done, Mexican Gold aka Return of the Outlaws. He's all over the cover and barely in the film. And we were finding that a lot. Couple that with the fact that there were movies like this out there of his that I'd thought I'd already done--The Swordsman and its sequel Gladiator Cop also come to mind--and you can see how he stalled while someone like his co-star in this, Gary Daniels, blew past him and into the 40 Club with Dolph. Recently I was on the Jacked Up Review Show podcast with Cam Sully, and I put Lamas 10th on my list of top DTV stars, behind Adkins at 9. It's possible I need to rethink that, that I may have been hasty in having Adkins jump him so soon.

Speaking of Gary Daniels, he only has a small role in this, but when you combine it with smaller fighter roles by another Hall of Famer, Art Camacho, and PM Mainstay Ian Jacklin, the three together work as a kind of PM fighter showcase that was really fun to see. While this is going to go down as a tag for Daniels and Camacho, like I did with Rothrock in the Saber Raine review, it won't count as a film for them, so I won't push any films they've done with bigger parts down my queue. I was going to say that in the past that kept me from doing more films with Daniels in the lead, because I didn't want to do too much Daniels all at once, but the truth is he has the second most tags after Dolph, and Camacho has the third most, so it doesn't really matter. As long as I can find the films, I can do the reviews.

As I mentioned above, Kathleen Kinmont's part was the emotional glue that held things together, especially with Worth and Lamas. Nowadays we applaud someone who can take a low-budget script shot on the quick and do more with it--look at Vivica A. Fox's success with David DeCoteau's "Wrong" movies. I think when we look back at Kinmont's PM career, we find she was just as professional and maybe even endured more--her lovemaking scene with Wings Hauser in Art of Dying comes to mind, and I can see Fox or another actress saying "that's not happening." Coming back to her PM Entertainment films after my hiatus, I think she's one of their unsung heroes, and hopefully as more of these films become available to the various streaming services out there, her contributions will be better recognized.

Finally, with this movie, PM will have 35 reviewed on here, putting them only a few away from Cannon as a movie house--Millennium has even more at 61, but I'm not sure where to put them. For PM to pass Cannon in tags would be a huge feat though. It may also mean I need to consider adding in Pepin and Merhi to the Hall of Fame, considering I already have Golan-Globus and Roger Corman in there. It's a testament to what PM meant to the DTV action world in the late 80s/early-to-mid 90s, and how a site like this wouldn't have been possible without them.

But the site is here, so it's time to wrap up. Right now this is on Tubi and Prime. It looks like a full-screen transfer, which isn't the worst thing in the world--you get to remember what it was like before widescreen TVs. If you want, I still have an old 13" TV kicking around if you really want to have the full experience.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104267