Black Creek (2024)

This is one that's been in production for some time, a labor of love for DTVC Hall of Famer and 40 Club member Cynthia Rothrock, we've seen myriad DTV stars attached to it who have dropped out, news of premiers and complementary media like a graphic novel, and finally a pre-order date ahead of it's recent release. Now that it's here and available, let's see how it did. In addition to us, Jon at the After Movie Diner and Chris DePetrillo at Bulletproof Action have covered this as well.

Black Creek starts with a sheriff (Patrick Kilpatrick) who gets bumped off by an evil landowner (Richard Norton). When the sheriff's sister (Rothrock) shows up and finds out her brother's been killed, she vows revenge. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but Norton's got a lot of men working for him, who in turn work Rothrock over and leave her for dead in the desert. Luckily, bumbling local drinker Roy (R. Marcus Taylor) finds her and brings her to a local medicine practitioner (Don "The Dragon" Wilson), who heals her in a wonderfully psychedelic sequence. With that out of the way and everyone sufficiently healed, it's time for our hero to get after it and get her revenge. Will she make it happen?

This is a fun deal. It's done on a budget, so there's plenty to pick at on that score if one were so inclined, but if it was between not having this because there wasn't the budget to make it look as clean as possible, or having what we got, I prefer the latter. My two qualms were the length, which at almost two hours was a bit long for me; and I think the script could've used some trimming--a lot of instances where someone says something, and someone asks why that is, and then the first person explains further, when we could've just had the further explanation without the back and forth. Those qualms are overshadowed by all the stuff that worked here though, like Rothrock as one of her best heroes since China O'Brien, Richard Norton as a chilling baddie in one of his final performances, and then guys like Wilson, Kilpatrick, and Keith Cooke giving us the fun performances we want from them when we see their names on the tin. It doesn't skimp on the action either, especially with Mike Möller as action director/fight choreographer. Again, budgetary constraints meant they couldn't do the quick edits we're used to in modern action, so instead we got sped up film that may not have looked as nice, but as a fan of everyone's work here, I was okay with it. This is a really great time that's worth supporting if you're a fan of Rothrock and everyone else involved.

I didn't mean to do Rothrock films on back-to-back weeks (and technically this is her third film in two months, with Darkness of Man back in May), but I felt like I needed to get this one reviewed sooner rather than later, if only to get the word out and support it. The reality for me as I was watching it was we needed a series of Westerns with Rothrock in the lead back in the 90s, and this should've been the callback to those movies thirty years later, but unfortunately we never got them in the 90s, so this has to be the movie that makes up for the movies that never were, if any of that makes sense. On the PM Podcast episode on Guardian Angel (which yours truly was also a guest, but not part of the Rothrock interview), she told Jon that she'd always wanted to do a Western and be the lead, and it shows, because she's a natural at it. Her Rose Jennings character in this is right up there with China O'Brien for me as her best character, even better than Kris Fairfield in the Rage and Honor films, and McKay in Guardian Angel. She also said on the PM Podcast interview that she plans to do a sequel, so hopefully that will happen. I think it's up to us to support this kind of thing though if we want to see it happen.

As I mentioned above, Richard Norton is fantastic in this. It unfortunately ended up being one of his final roles, but if it had to be, I think it's a nice thing that it was in this, making it as good as it could possibly be by his performance. In my Not Another Mistake post, I talked about how he knew exactly what a movie needed from him and he knew exactly how to deliver it, and that's so true here. Patrick Kilpatrick also would've made a great baddie, but I like the twist of him being one of the good guys; and then we have Norton giving us this fantastic villain who is sufficiently evil, but never takes away from Rothrock as the hero. We're going to miss him, but at least we have this performance here as a reminder of how great he was--as if we needed it.

Our third Hall of Famer and second 40 Club member in this is the great Don "The Dragon" Wilson, who plays Xiyang, part-Chinese part-Apache medicine and martial arts practitioner. I wish they would've done more with the Apache side if they felt it was that necessary to include that as part of his heritage, like maybe some advanced knife fighting through a sequence where he takes out three or four of Norton's baddies. That aside, Wilson is as all in as Norton was, which is nice considering, like Rothrock, we've been getting a lot of smaller roles from him lately. And after this, we have Taken from Rio Bravo, where he has almost as big a part as this, but beyond that, I think the rest we have of his to do are all small roles. In that sense, when we get a Dragon role and performance like this, we need to take it and run.

Finally, I want to touch on the length of this movie, because, as you know, I'm a stickler for runtimes. Recently in a writer's group I'm in, the topic came up that, if we want our books to sell, we need short chapters. For me, I don't think about my novels that way. If short chapters fit, I'll use them, like in my first novel Chad in Accounting, or my short action novel Bainbridge; if not, you get something like Don's House in the Mountains, which is five chapters over 275 pages. With that in mind, if Rothrock felt like she needed her movie to be almost two hours to tell the story she wanted to tell, then more power to her. If the mindset is similar to mine, where she didn't want to compromise on the story that was important to her just to get things in under 90 minutes, I can appreciate it.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently this is available as rent VOD and purchase on most major streaming sites that offer that kind of thing. I personally got it on Fandango at Home through a promo code I had. This is a great opportunity to support indie filmmakers, and hopefully the more we're able to support these efforts, the more movies they'll be able to make.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27078378

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

Last Kumite (2024)

This is one Ty from Comeuppance and I covered on episode 202 of the DTVC Podcast, and with the names involved, it was only a matter of time before we got a review on the site as well. I addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, and Outlaw Vern have covered this as well.

Last Kumite has Mathis Landwehr (in English "Matty Country Defense") as Michael Rivers, youngest son of famous singer Johnny Rivers, and nicknamed "Bloody Rivers" because he's such a devastating fighter. After winning a tournament, he decides to bring his teenage daughter with him to the after party, which is held at a night club, and then decides to have her drive herself home alone while he hangs out with Matthias Hues. Hues wants Rivers to fight in his Kumite in Europe--and maybe get his dad to perform "Secret Agent Man" there as well--and while Rivers refuses, because he's such a great father, his daughter is easy pickin's for someone like Hues to snatch, and now Rivers is forced to get his Kumite on. Will he defeat Hues? And will his dad show up and perform?

This was a nice slice of all right. No, Michael "Bloody" Rivers wasn't the son of Johnny Rivers, but everything else in that synopsis is correct. Did we need the forced-to-fight angle? Probably not, but this film had a bouillabaisse approach to the material that I had to respect, even if we didn't get that Johnny Rivers performance. I mentioned that this had a lot of names above. We have three Hall of Famers, the aforementioned Hues, plus Cynthia Rothrock and Billy Blanks; plus familiar names Michel Qissi, Kurt McKinney, and Mike Möller (who was also fight choreographer); and if that wasn't enough, we had Bolo Yeung's son David, Stan Bush did some of the songs, and director/cinematographer Ross Clarkson has done a ton of great DTV action stuff, most notably many of Isaac Florentine's films with Scott Adkins. So they lined up a bunch of familiar talent, but not only that, they all got what the point of this was, and they delivered. There were definitely some tongue-in-cheek elements, but any that there were were done out of love, which is all us fans want. The hero, Landwehr, has plenty-good martial arts skills, plus fellow fighter Monia Moula was also really talented. Maybe after this they can give us a German buddy cop/cop on the edge kind of deal, they'd be great together in that. Finally, our big bad fighter that our hero had to defeat, Dracko (Mike Derudder), not only had a great name, but he was essentially a juice-head that someone picked up off of Seaside Heights, NJ. Maybe this had its flaws, and it was working on a tight budget, but overall it delivered for me.

While she had more of a supporting role, we have to start with Cynthia Rothrock, because she's our only 40 Club member in the film, this making her 45th film on the site. Her character was Dracko's original sensei, so she helps Bloody Rivers defeat him, because she doesn't like what he's become since leaving the Jersey Shore, and I don't blame her either--she had to beat the GTL out of him. We've seen some scant roles for her recently, like Darkness of Man, so it was good that here, even in a supporting part, she gets a good amount of screentime. At 45 films with a little less than half the year left, is the 50 Club a possibility by 2026? We'd have to do around one film a month for her, and while I have one in the can, Taken from Rio Bravo, and one I'm looking to watch over the next couple days, Black Creek, I don't know if she has enough left that we can do that I can get on a free streamer or one I already subscribe to. We'll see as the year goes on, but making her the fifth member of the 50 Club, and only the third actor, would be really cool.

Our other two Hall of Famers are Matthias Hues and Billy Blanks. Hues is just a straight up scenery chewing baddie, which is exactly what you want from him; and Blanks is a fantastic fight trainer, bringing us back to Showdown where he was great too. Between the two, Hues has been busier lately, with a bunch of stuff out there, some of which we'll probably cover at some point; but while Blanks doesn't have the quantity, he does have a Circuit sequel, Circuit 4: Faith Fighter, which is $2 to rent on Prime. I looked on IMDb, and it has one critic review. What? What are you doing Jalal Merhi? You should be sending that out to all of us so we can cover it. Of course I say that while I have a backlog of screeners I still need to catch up on. Anyway, great to see these two here, and they both turn in fantastic performances.

We should devote at least one paragraph to the film's star, Mathis Landwehr. This is our second time seeing him on the site, after 2017's Ultimate Justice. There's been a long line of next names since I started this site in 2007, and the only one who's really been able to break through is Scott Adkins. Compare that to all the names we've seen who were one or two and done. Matthew Reese in Riot for example. Tony Schiena has had come up a few times. Matt Mullins is another. Amy Johnston looked primed to be a bigger name, but we haven't seen her as much recently--though she is in the newest R. Ellis Frazier film, so we'll have to check that out. Probably the biggest of the ones who never quite made it is Johnny Messner, who now does more supporting work and producing. The thing is, the old guard is still getting after it, and as a result, there isn't as much room to break through as there was in the 90s. One advantage Landwehr might have is the fact that he lives in Germany, and can make a name for himself there first, especially if he's working with an extreme fight talent like Mike Möller. Germany all around has had a much more robust action ecosystem than we have. According to IMDb, he has a couple films in the hopper that look good, so I'll be excited to check them out. Who knows, we might have our next big name.

Finally, this is the Last Kumite. Whether or not this movie intends to put a bow on all Kumite movies, or if other adventurous filmmakers out there will defy this film's title and make further Kumite films, only time will tell. Maybe the next one will be the "New Kumite"? The thing about "Kumite," is the way it's spelled looks like Riunite. I haven't had that in forever, but I remember the commercials. Every time I hear "Reunited" by Peaches and Herb, I think "Riunite and it feels so good." The other song that gets in my head with this film's title is "Last Worthless Evening" by Don Henley. This is the last, kuuu-mi-teee, that you'll have to spend. A bit of a stretch, but tell my brain that when the earworm sets in. There's not always a rhyme or reason to it, but the earworm isn't any less real. As an aside, we always talk about the late 80s/early 90s as the golden age of DTV action. I think it was at least a silver age of Adult Contempo too, right? The late 70s/early 80s has to be the golden age, but when you hit like "Higher Love" in 1986, there's a good maybe seven or eight years of a new age of easy listening that made trips to the doctor's or the DMV much more pleasant. What a great time, I could watch a PM actioner, then turn on my radio and hear Michael Bolton and Kenny G charting. As Steve Winwood said so eloquently, I can light the night up with my soul on fire...

And while no one is really paying tribute to my self-styled silver age of adult contempo, at least here we get a nice tribute to the tournament actioners of that time. You can get it on Tubi as of my writing this, which is a great way to go. And if you haven't yet, check out the podcast episode Ty and I did as well, number 202 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17351056

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

Atomic Eden (2015)

After seeing how great Mike Möller was in Ultimate Justice, I was excited to see what else he had for us, and found this on Tubi. Throw in The Hammer, who I'm always saying I need to do more of on the site; and then Lamas tacked on in some way, and this seemed like a no-brainer. As we know though, it's often the no-brainers that turn into the not-so-good ones. In addition to us, our friends at Bulletproof Action have looked at this as well, so you can see what they thought as well.

Atomic Eden has Williamson a private military contractor who's been hired for a big job retrieving an item in Chernobyl, so he needs to round up his old crew and go in there to make it happen. As is often the case though, things aren't what they seem, as a bunch of men in white hazmat suits and gas masks descend on them, and now they need to do everything they can to fight their way out. Will they make it out alive? And exactly what is this device that they're risking their lives to retrieve? Is it worth all this trouble? And how does Lorenzo Lamas figure into all this?

Man, that's a great question, right? Is it worth it? I can ask the same thing about this movie. I mentioned that I was watching it to Ty from Comeuppance, and he asked, based off the name "is it a space slog?" I responded "no, it's a one location slog." I think that unfortunately sums it up. There were some pacing issues, especially with this device where the film starts at the 20-minute mark where they get ambushed in Chernobyl, and then goes back to Williamson rounding up his crew. That was clunky and caused me to lose interest a bit. Then we have the crew interacting with each other, which was also clunky. Then the action starts, and it's mostly the crew getting picked off like the cast of a horror movie. I don't know, I like that device in a horror movie, but action movies are not meant to be "Last Girl"-type constructs. Beyond all that though, We got a good amount of Williamson, and he was great in that good amount of him; I like Möller's fight scenes, which were fantastic again--and well-choreographed by him; and I liked his pairing with Hazuki Kato. To some extent, the movie might have been better if it were just those three kicking ass and taking names, rather then adding in a bunch of characters who are just there to be developed then killed off.

This is the space reserved for our requisite "we had planned on doing more Williamson on the site, and we've been woefully derelict in fulfilling that promise" paragraph, but when I looked I saw that the last Williamson was Jackson Bolt in June, and with the last one before that being Down 'n Dirty in February, it seems like we're doing a new Williamson every four months. When you compare that to Dolph, who's about one every three months, and Seagal is actually where Williamson, averaging about one every four months, I guess that means I have been doing more Williamson on here. And what I liked about this one was how much Williamson we got. It seems like a lot of his newer ones have less of him in them, and I can't blame him for that considering he's done plenty of great ones and he's in his 80s now; but here at 75, he could still get after it, which may bode well for some of the other DTVC Hall of Famers out there that are over 60.

Someone who isn't pushing 60, Mike Möller, who showed up again with some really fantastic fight scenes. The problem here was we had so much else going on with all the other characters, that we didn't get as much of him as we'd have wanted. His stuff is absolutely electric, you could put him up there with guys like Iko Uwais, the problem I think is Uwais speaks fluent English, which allows him to carry the non-action scenes off better. I don't know if we'll get Möller on that level, and it looks like after Ultimate Justice he went back to strictly German films. I feel like with the proliferation of action films being shot and produced by guys like Jesse V. Johnson, Ross Boyask, and Daniel Zirilli, there has to be a place for Möller in at least one of them. We need more of this guy!

The Lamas extra was an interesting twist. I had no idea he was in it until his name came up in the credits. It was a nice surprise, since we hadn't seen Lamas in over a year, when we did Gladiator Cop, which was really just him in edited footage from The Swordsman. This is now 35 for him, and out of all the actors in the 30 Club, he's probably best poised to get into the 40 Club. I have one in the can that I've seen already, Bordercross, which was taken off of Tubi before I could get images of it; and then I saw a few others are available on Tubi as well that I could make happen. We haven't moved anyone into the 40 Club since Cannon went in, so it'll be interesting if Lamas is that one.

 

 

Finally, this film used baddies in gas masks to allow them to have only a few stunt actors be as many as possible. A great trick for stretching the budget, and beyond that, I personally enjoy that approach: it's like this mass of endless, faceless killers coming to get them. I guess that added to the "Final Girl" horror element we had here, but I liked it better from the standpoint of the bad guys than from a plot device with all the heroes getting picked off one-by-one. I get too that it probably sounds inconsistent. How can I like one thing and not the other? My response is, "how can I not?"

And with that, let's wrap this up. Free on Tubi isn't the worst deal, but because of a lot of the extraneous character development and unevenly paced plot, the 90 minutes feels closer to 120, which hurts. I think if you're looking for more Williamson, and want to see what Mike Möller can do, this might do the trick for you though.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2974726

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Ultimate Justice (2017)

In looking to get more Mark Dacascos on the site, I saw this one on Tubi, with a nice runtime around 90 minutes and also featuring Matthias Hues. Why wouldn't I review this? Also, I was preparing to have Ty and Brett from Comeuppance on the pod to talk about Mark Dacascos, and figured I'd get as many as I could in before that. In addition to us, Simon at Explosive Action has covered this one, so you can go to his site to see what he thought of it. Now, without any further ado...

Ultimate Justice has Dacascos as the head of a mercenary group who decides he's had enough after one of the team gets killed on a mission. So he sells the company at a big profit and has a big party to celebrate, where his business partner Wolfgang Riehm meets a beautiful woman. 8 years later Dacascos meets Riehm at his beautiful house to have dinner with him and his wife, and after he leaves, later that night, some baddies break in, rape and kill the wife, and beat up Riehm. Now Dacascos has to get the gang back together to exact Ultimate Justice!

 

For me, I was of split mind on this one. On the one hand, there was some great action, which I enjoyed; on the other the story was really contrived and to some extent not plausible, and I think it hampered things a bit. Yes, I always say good action outdoes bad story, but this one was a bit too convoluted for me. The other problem was the film's revenge construct meant we lost a lot of great characters just as we began to like them. No spoilers, but in some cases these characters were really put through the ringer, only to just be killed off. When you go down the list of rules for action movies, I think killing off characters with impunity is one we don't see often, but it still counts. Action is similar to horror, in that we in the audience won't always go with you if you kill off characters we like, and this movie didn't seem to care--and for me, the film suffered as a result.

We've seen Mark Dacascos as both the lead hero and the lead baddie, and he does both equally well. In this movie his character is more of a jerk than either of those two, and unfortunately that isn't a good look on him. That may come from the old adage that the best baddies in movies are played by people who are really nice in real life, and Dacascos seems like a genuinely nice person in real life. World domination is one thing, but stealing his buddy's woman didn't seem like good fit for him. On the other hand, the action scenes he has in this are fantastic, and that's really what we come for. I think from that respect, this movie really works, and why I think a lot of people weren't bothered enough by the plot and enjoyed this.

When Ty and Brett came on to discuss Dacascos, I think the main theme was that Dacascos is one of the best out there doing this, and while he should have gotten better big screen roles, his career has by no means not been successful. When we see his name on the tin, we know what kind of electric martial arts he's going to bring, and for us fans of the genre, that's all we ask. This film marks his 20th on the site, so he has some time to go before he hits the 30 Club and beyond, but the DTVC Hall of Fame? I think that could be in his future this fall.

Speaking of tags, this is 15 for Matthias Hues, but I believe this is his first as a good guy. I have to say, I often enjoyed rooting for him as a baddie, so it was nice to be able to root for him guilt free in this one. He has a good amount of stuff out there, especially in those late 80s/early 90s Golden Years of DTV, that I haven't touched yet, so we should be seeing him here a lot in the future. When we look back on the 1000+ posts we've done on the site, Hues is one that, while we don't put him up there with a Dacascos, without him, the 80s and 90s for DTV wouldn't be what we know it as. Oh, and look at the screen I took of him. Best scene since Bolo Yeung was working a food truck in Tiger Claws II.

Finally, we're always talking about who could be in the next wave of great action stars, and one to keep an eye on here was Mike Möller. His martial arts prowess was fantastic, and the scenes he was in were the kind of high octane stuff we want out of a movie like this. I looked online, and he has three more movies on Tubi, one in particular that features Hall of Famers Fred Williamson and Lorenzo Lamas. We'll definitely bump that one up in the queue, and I'll tag Möller now with the idea being that we plan to see more of him in the future.

And on a good note like that, let's wrap this one up. This movie clocks in at a good 90 minutes, and has a pretty nice action quotient; but the story is a bit of a drag, and the film tends to kill people off after having us invest a lot in them, which is a bit of a dirty trick that I don't enjoy. The fact that this is on Tubi and Prime is a definite selling point too. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4041476