Click: The Calendar Girl Killer (1990)

Next up for our 2024 Hall of Fame inductions we have Dona Speir. She was best known for her Sidaris LETHAL Ladies films, but because we'd exhausted all the ones she starred in, we needed something else, and I found this gem on YouTube. In addition to us, Stacie Ponder at Final Girl has covered this as well.

Click: The Calendar Girl Killer has the great Ross Hagen (who also wrote and co-directed) as a famous photographer that may or may not also be a guy who dresses like a female nurse and kills people. Anyway, he has this crazy grinchy idea to do a violence-themed photo shoot, so he gets a bunch of models out to a ranch he has, and starts shooting them in skimpy outfits with various weapons in their hands. One of the models (Keely Sims) is there with her boyfriend (Gregory Scott Cummins), and he's not happy with her modeling career. He may have a case, because in the last 25 minutes or so, their model friends start getting bumped off. Can PI Hoke Howell help? Probably not, so it's up to Cummins and Sims to save themselves.

This is pretty fantastic, but it's not a 1990 fantastic, it's a 1990 in 2024 fantastic. If this was made today, and didn't kill anyone until an hour in, or if I was watching this in 1990 and saw that no one was killed until an hour in, I'd be like what the hell am I watching? But a 1990 movie in 2024, I know exactly what I'm watching, and I love it. Like when Gregory Scott Cummins on his dirt bike is chasing after Keely Smith and Ross Hagen on a winding highway, only to have another car come into his lane and hit him, causing him to go flying 20 feet in the air and land in a bunch of trees. Is he dead? Nope, "nothing's broken except my pride." It's like life can't get much better than that, can it? And there are more of those beautiful "what just happened?" moments that, combined with all the Members Only jackets, guys that probably hung out with your grandfather with popped collars hanging out with twentysomethings, and names you recognize, that make this such a great time. It's like a savings bond, it's only worth half as much in 1990 as it's worth now. 

Speir is only in this at the very beginning, though based on the fact that she's in the opening violence-themed photo shoot montage--holding a bow and arrow no less--my hunch is she was supposed to be in this more. Consider the number of writers, 6, and the number of directors, 2, this probably had all kinds of issues, and maybe at some point they lost Dona, whether it was due to other commitments, or she just didn't want to work with them anymore. Whatever the reason, this was a smaller role than we'd like for a Hall of Fame induction post, but she doesn't have much more work after this beyond the Sidaris films we've already covered. And those of course are the reason she's getting this HOF induction. One of the definitive DTV franchises, the LETHAL Ladies films, and Speir was in seven of them, acting as the lead for five starting with Savage Beach--and perhaps fitting that in her first scene in this film, she's accompanied by Michael J. Shane, who played Shane Abilene in the LETHAL Ladies films after it was decided to center the films on her instead of whichever Abilene who couldn't shoot straight that Sidaris cast. We've seen bigger budget franchises of 5 or more films led by a woman now with Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil films or Kate Beckinsale with the Underworld films, but it's still rare for a woman to helm a franchise over that many films, and Speir did it more than ten years before them. She may not have the large CV of other Hall of Famers, but the legacy of the films she's had is much greater. Here's to you Ms. Speir, you're truly one of the greats.

Someone who's making a case for a future induction is one Mr. Ross Hagen, which is something I didn't see coming when I started this site, knowing him more for 60s films like Hellcats and Sidehackers--which I discovered is actually called Five the Hard Way? But he's had quite a DTV career, starting with 1986's Armed Response, and making almost 40 DTV flicks before he passed in 2011. In the late 80s/early 90s he existed well in this space as a guy born in the 30s, wearing Members Only jackets and later-season Happy Days Tom Boseley transition sunglasses, speaking with his raspy, 70s Love Boat guest star voice, giving you that sense that he could either be your grandfather's younger friend, or a coke dealer, or maybe both. There's something soothing about it, and it is kind of crazy to think that Robert Downey Jr. was two years older when he made Avengers: End Game than Hagen was when he made this, because Downey Jr. isn't really a fun mix of grandfather's younger friend and coke dealer. That explains why Downey has to slum it making another Avengers movie, while Hagen was killing it in classics like this.

Does a movie that has "killer" in the title need to have kills sooner? Does a movie that has "calendar girl" in the title need actual calendar girls? Or maybe Neil Sedaka? Speaking of which, how did we make it through the 90s without getting Neil Sedaka in one of these movies? Yes, if you look at his IMDb bio, the songs he wrote in the 60s and 70s are still making him money, so it wasn't like he needed a quick paycheck; and I can't imagine he ran in the same circles as guys like Ross Hagen and Troy Donahue that maybe could've gotten him in a film like this just for fun, but still, I needed Neil Sedaka in a Members Only jacket with a pastel Izod-Lacost polo under it, pointing a revolver at someone while holding it in both hands. Anyway, no calendar girls, and no killers until the end, should be a wrap for a film like this, but in a way it adds to the charm. Like do I care what the movie is called when Hagen packs off a group of models and crew into a van, the van drives off, and then blows up, seemingly out of nowhere? Call it "Ross Hagen may at some point eventually dress up as a female nurse and kill people" if you want, if you're going to load it up with the stuff they did here, I'll take it.

Finally, we have a Chinatown sighting. This actually isn't the first time we've seen LA's Chinatown in a movie, there was also Lethal Ninja, and Chinatown Connection. I was trying to think of how many other Chinatowns we've had. The best I could do is a search of my site, which means I would've had to mention it in the post. Of those, we also had New York Chinatown, but then I think that's it for American ones. Outside the US, we've had Melbourne's in Revenge of the Gweilo, Manila's in Bloodfist, and Tokyo's in the Seagal flick Into the Sun. This dovetails with a point I'm about to make about the Chinatown here in Philly, which is danger based on a recent development between the mayor and the NBA team, the 76ers. In my post on The Double, I talked about Washington DC and how it had a nice Chinatown. I hadn't been in 10 years at that point, but earlier this year I went there to see a Wizards game, because the arena is also in Chinatown. In 2001, that arena was new--It was called the MCI Center, remember that company?--and Chinatown was much more robust. Now, in 2024, it's a shell of what it was then, the arena and all the accompanying development that comes with it had diminished it considerably, now instead of the Mongolian restaurant, we had a Yard House and Caesar's Sportsbook. In Philly they want to do the same thing, only the arena the Sixers and the mayor want to build will not only do the same thing to our Chinatown, it will also jam up the main east-west thoroughfare on game nights, making the city a total mess. It puts me in a quandary, because, like others, other than the one ticket I'd already bought for a game, I'm done with them until they change course on this; but on the other, tickets are really cheap right now. Opening night is under $60, which I haven't seen that low since the mid-2010s when they were horrible. It's tempting, but I gotta be strong. Save Philly's Chinatown, no Sixers arena downtown!

And with that, let's wrap this up. I found this on YouTube. That version wasn't bad, so hopefully it'll stay there for a while, because this is a lot of fun and worth checking out. And then congratulations to Dona Speir on your induction into the Hall of Fame! It's well deserved, and people can celebrate by watching any of your LETHAL Ladies films on Tubi.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099278

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action U.S.A. (1989)

Back in January we had Jon Cross from The After Movie Diner and Miscellaneous Plumbing Fixtures on the podcast to discuss this gem. It was a great conversation and well worth checking out. I had been meaning to cover this for a long time, so it was good to finally make it happen, and now we're making it happen on the site too. In addition to us, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Fred the Wolf at Full Moon Movies, and Chris the Brain at Bulletproof action have covered this.

Action U.S.A. follows a woman named Carmen (Barri Murphy) whose boyfriend is killed by some baddies looking for the diamonds he stole. That's when two FBI agents, Osborn and McKinnon (Gregory Scott Cummins and William Hubbard Knight), come to her rescue, as they've been tasked with finding the diamonds too. In response head baddie Cameron Mitchell hires famed assassin Ross Hagen to take the girl out and get the diamonds back. Really, none of this plot matters, it's just about how many awesome stunts we can cram into the film.

And do they ever cram the stunts in. This is 90 minutes of pure late 80s action. It starts with a car chasing a helicopter with a man hanging out of it through the city streets of Waco, TX. That chase takes us through various stunts before the helicopter gets ditched, we resume with two cars, and it ends with the boyfriend and our heroine flying over a school bus, and the guys chasing them flying through a camper. And that's just the beginning! The thing is, this film doesn't need a plot, but the fact that it has one and it makes any sense at all is amazing unto itself. On the podcast, Jon said every five years or so we should just give some stuntfolk a bunch of money and set them down in Texas with some equipment and let them have at it, and after seeing the result in this film, I couldn't agree more. 

One of the funnier aspects of this is how the heroes, especially Gregory Scott Cummins's character, aren't that good at what they do. Usually the hero is an expert, like a weapon who is unleashed on the baddies. Here though, Cummins and Knight are constantly getting beaten up, losing shootouts, losing the baddies. Cummins at one point gets caught by Ross Hagen and his men--which included the great Hoke Howell--and is just beaten up continuously; or there's a scene where the guys go into a good ol' boys bar, and the film makes light of the fact that Knight, being black, isn't exactly welcome there, so he gets tossed through some cedar lattice by the patrons. The thing is though, this isn't played overtly like a Frank Drebin or something, it's more something you start to realize gradually as you're watching the film, which makes it all the better.

The number of great B-movie names in this is fantastic too. Gregory Scott Cummins, who usually is a baddie or heavy, is fun as the hero. He seems to get exactly what the filmmakers are going for with his part, and he delivers. As a MSTie I'm always a fan of seeing Ross Hagen in anything, but here he cuts a particularly interesting figure. When Hoke Howell and his partner pick him up at the airport, he arrives in a personal aircraft that's so small he can literally lift up the back and tow it where he wants to park it. He's also in this ridiculous cowboy get up, which he says he's wearing to blend in with the locals. Then we have William Smith as Cummins and Knight's boss. As Jon said in the pod, if you have a B-movie actor you're a fan of, chances are he's been chewed out by William Smith from behind a desk, and that's exactly the part he's playing here, the admonitions to the guys under him sufficiently gravelly. Finally there's Cameron Mitchell, he who never met a sit-down role he didn't love, here he sits in a hot tub or a couch, mostly complaining to people on the phone. It's all the accoutrements that make an 80s movie great, you just feel like you're where you should be when you're watching it.

Then there's the stunts, which are next level. When we see the guys at a gas station, and there's a big storage tank in the background, we know it's only a matter of time before that goes up, but yet they still manage to do it in a way that isn't perfunctory or pedestrian. The plot is a vehicle to get us from one stunt scene to the next: how can we put the characters in a circumstance that allows us to blow something up, set someone on fire, or throw someone out of a building? This is how action is supposed to be. When we see "action" listed as the genre on the tin, this is what we hope for, and seldom get, at least to this level. That's okay though, they can't all be this awesome, but they could all be closer, right? It feels like the filmmakers had a clock in their head as they wrote the script, "oh, we've had too many consecutive pages of dialog, we need to insert an action sequence here." But even then, a chase scene isn't just a chase scene, it's a pace car running off the road and through a house, which causes the house to explode. Why not, right? Just set up the IV and pump this directly into my veins.

 

Finally, as a certified English as a second language teacher, it's interesting to note that when this came out in the late 80s, we still needed to put periods between the letters in an acronym. Now it's standard to write acronyms without them, but I guess because this film was made when we did, we couldn't go back and Lucas the title to make it fit the modern standard, so we still have the periods. I was trying to think of other standards in English that have changed like that, and one that comes to mind is double-spacing before a new sentence. That one's even more recent, because if you look at my older posts, they all have the double-space after the period, etc. I think I may have held onto that standard longer than it was considered standard, and with my first novel, I had to go back and delete the second space before self-publishing it. It was an arduous process, and now I just single-space all the time.

And with that, let's wrap this up. In the States this is available for free on Tubi. That's a great way to see it, but this is also one of those greats that's worth adding to your collection as well, and Vinegar Syndrome has a great version. This is the 80s action you came for. Also the podcast episode is in the archives, episode 91, so definitely check that out when you get a chance, Jon and I have a great conversation.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096757

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

Droid Gunner aka Cyberzone (1995)

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

Dinosaur Island (1994)

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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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

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

Blood Games (1990)

This is another in our Netflix Dump 8, and I chose this one for two reasons: one, it has the late great Ross Hagen; and two, it looked like the kind of late-night schlock thriller I remember being on cable TV on the early 90s.  Of course, it could just fall flat and I'll have wasted my time and end up writing a review no one reads about a movie they have no intention ever of seeing.  But still, Ross Hagen.

Blood Games is about a team of barnstorming women baseball players who make money by betting locals in games.  In a small Southern town, the local town boss won't pay Hagen after the ladies win, so Hagen has to get his money by attacking the boss in the bathroom of the town's one bar.  The problem is, one of his daughters and another girl get worried (why would you worry about Ross Hagen taking care of business?) and are assaulted by a couple locals, including the son of the town boss.  Hagen has to save them, and he's fatally stabbed in the process; but as the girls escape, they kill the town boss's son.  Now all the redneck males in the area have been mobilized to stop and kill the girls.  Can they get out of town before they're caught?  And what happens when some of them decide to fight back instead of run.



So this is that early 90s cable schlockfest.  This is like 3AM on TNT pre-New Classics, and if that kind of thing were still as prevalent on cable TV, it's a definite rabbit hole thing that you could find yourself in if you were up that late battling insomnia or procrastinating on a term paper.  I mean, don't get me wrong, it's got bad dialog, and most of the actors and actresses have only this film on their imdb bio, but the tension is real and it drew me in all the way.  It does have some mean-spirited elements, like a woman who is gang raped, then rescued, only to be killed right after.  But I think even as a guy, it's really entertaining to watch a group of women take out a bunch of ignorant rednecks, probably the same way it was entertaining to see Jamie Foxx do it in Django Unchained.

Ross Hagen, as I mentioned above, isn't in this much, which is disappointing, because he's great early on.  When is Hagen not great though?  I imagine the film makers only had enough to pay him for one day of filming, which is why he's not in it as much.  The other name in this is Gregory Scott Cummins, and he plays the town boss's son, meaning he's done early on too, so it's probably the same deal with him.  Ross Hagen passed away in May of 2011, just shy of his 73rd birthday.  Even though I've just scratched the surface of his DTV output-- which was very prodigious-- I loved him in his great biker flicks from the 60s and 70s.  Here's to you Ross Hagen, you were one of the great ones, and you will be missed.



With Wild Girl Waltz and Venom on here recently, we've had a lot of talk about the Bechdel Test, and surprisingly, I don't think this movie passes it, despite how many women are in the film.  I guess in the moments when they're talking about their wounds or a play one made, but really, all of the conversations are centered on the threat posed by the guys.  On a female empowerment level it might work better, because the women refuse to simply be victims.  It's an odd interplay though, because we're still left with the overarching idea that these women wouldn't be in this mess if the two girls had listened to Ross Hagen in the first place, though perhaps the better point is that they were in the mess because they trusted Hagen who brought them to that shady town, and it wasn't until they took agency over their own affairs that they got shit done.  All things to consider in unpacking the film industry's default setting of patriarchy.

Let's get back to that then, this idea of being a barnstorming women's baseball team.  This was an outdated idea for 1990, at least in the form we saw here.  Maybe they could play against independent leagues, but how would you organize something like this otherwise?  Get the town together for a baseball game?  Really?  I could see maybe as a novelty at a local fair.  But that's how movies like this often start, with an unbelievable premise, and it's what happens after that counts, which is where this film made its money.  We can all sympathize with being chased by rednecks in a small Southern town and how scary that would be.



That brings up another greater point about Major League Baseball in America between the time this was made and the time I'm writing this review.  In 1990 MLB was it in the sports world, bigger than anything else.  Now it's the NFL, and even in the summer when MLB technically has no competition, the NFL is tops, for instance with ESPN having more shows dedicated to the NFL than MLB.  So as out of date the idea of a barnstorming women's baseball team would have been in 1990, the idea of centering a movie like this on baseball instead of football or basketball today would be equally out of date.  Maybe a barnstorming women's basketball team playing pick-up games would be the perfect film in 2013.

Now that Netflix has dumped this, used VHS is the only way to go, and it can be pricey, like $20 or $30.  That's why I say this should be for VHS collectors only, and really hardcore ones at that.  It's a perfect "post the covers pics on my Tumblr/showcase it on the shelf" kind of gem.  As an aside, for our Australian readers, including our friend Simon at Explosive Action (who we know is a big VHS collector), imdb says that the Australian title is "Baseball Bimbos in Hillbilly Hell".

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099151/

Marked for Murder (1989)

I noticed it had been a bit since we'd covered a Wings Hauser film here, so I caught wind of this and decided to make it happen. Why not, right, you can never have enough Wings Hauser in your life, that's what I always say.

Marked for Murder has DTVC Hall of Famer Wings Hauser as Emerson (Lake and Palmer), a TV exec who sends an assistant and an intern to some guy's place to get a big box VHS tape for their big box VHS movie club night. When they get there, a detective gives them a hard time, and they have to talk their way out of the place-- but they have the tapes. Then they get chased by that cop, and also find out that the guy whose place it is has been killed-- and the murder was pinned on them. Now they need to clear their names and get the tape to Hauser in time for their big box VHS movie night-- they're screening R.O.T.O.R.!



Whoa! Hold the phone, son! I'm looking at Wings Hauser on the cover, but where is he in my movie? Did I sign on for a mush faced wannabe Arch Hall Jr. and Martin Sheen's lesser known daughter Renee? I think I signed on for Wings Hauser, didn't I? But then, after about 30 minutes off-screen, there he is again, at a strip club, trying to remember the name of the Singapore Sling so he can order one from the waitress. It might be one of Wings Hauser's best scenes ever. Now I'm faced with a dilemma: kill this for being a bait-and-switch, or love it for the great Wings that it does have. I don't know...

The thing with Wings Hauser is, there's a certain je ne sais quois, and really, if you get it, you know it's something I can't explain to those who don't. It's the seeing him in a members only jacket and tight tennis shorts assisting a woman at his house with her suntanning. And it's us, as the viewer, getting to say "why yes, this is a members only jacket I'm wearing." It's the scene at the strip club, where he's trying to remember the name of the Singapore Sling. Only Wings can make that kind of thing awesome, in a way that only Wings can. The issue is: does some of the best Wings you've ever seen make up for the fact that there isn't as much of him on-screen due to a bait-and-switch? Again, I don't know...



One of the biggest misconceptions about this blog is that the word "connoisseur" in the name is meant to denote that I think I have a higher knowledge or more discerning taste when it comes to movies over other people. The name, "Direct to Video Connoisseur", is actually entirely tongue-in-cheek, meant to conjure up images of someone in a smoking jacket with a pipe, Alistair Cooke style, watching Dolph Lundgren movies. That said, I have to admit that seeing Ross Hagen and Wings Hauser share the same screen, even for only a short period at the end, made me feel like something of a literal connoisseur. It was like sitting on a music sharing site, and waiting weeks for a rare live version of a song from one of my favorite bands, featuring a guest vocal from another one of my favorite singers, and when Ross Hagen appears on screen for the first time, near the end of the film, and he and Wings share their first line, I had that same feeling I get when I play that song I'd waited to download for so long. I just needed my smoking jacket and my pipe. This extends my dilemma, because it has this gem at the end, but before that, I'm dealing with a Wings Hauser bait-and-switch. I just don't know...

Martin Sheen has a cameo in this. It's a cameo that is given away in the opening credits, but a cameo just the same. His daughter, Renee, is the assistant that Hauser sends out with the mush faced Arch Hall Jr. wannabe. The cameo is sweet, because he's just a man in the park, but after a couple close-ups, all he does is stand there like a bewildered old man, watching the action-- or lack thereof-- happening in front of him. It was pretty fantastic. It happens at the 50 minute mark, which is right after Wings comes back into the picture. The problem is, there's still that crap before it because this was a Wings Hauser bait-and-switch. Ugh, I don't know...



It was this mush faced Arch Hall Jr. wannabe who replaced Wings Hauser for most of the film. That's right. You may recognize him from Vice Academy, or another Wings films I've done, Mind, Body, and Soul, where he had a sex scene with Ginger Lynn Allen. He currently works in the biz editing popular reality shows, including a couple of my favorites, The Jersey Shore, and Tool Academy.

So, I'm going to lay it all out here for you: first off, this is only available in the States on VHS, and it might cost you if you aren't lucky. Second, we're talking Wings Hauser bait-and-switch for a good chunk of the middle of the film, but when he comes back in, it's some of the best Wings ever. Third, Ross Hagen and Wings Hauser together on one screen, even if it's only for a brief period of time. Fourth and finally, Martin Sheen cameo as a befuddled old man in the park. As far as the rest of the nuts and bolts, bad dialog, not always the best acting, and not a lot of actual action. I guess, all in all, the film worked for me, but that's a tough call, and if you're not a huge Wings fan, you might want to stay off this one.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097837/

Storm Trooper (1998)

I first got wind of this when I saw it reviewed over at Mr. Gable's Reality, which is a really great site if you haven't checked it out. Anyway, beyond the cast, that included Zach Galligan (the guy from Gremlins, not The Hangover), the bad guy from Revenge of the Ninja, Ross Hagen, Carol Alt, and Corey Feldman, it had one of the coolest dudes ever, Rick Hill, also known as The Deathstalker. When I found out Netflix had it, I knew I had to make it happen.

Storm Trooper isn't about dudes in white suits with cool white ski helmets who fight the rebels in Star Wars, it's about cyborg soldiers-- or cops, we're not, and I don't the film makers are sure which-- one of whom escapes, and the military wants him back. He avoids death at the hands of Kool Moe Dee and Ross Hagen, only to wind up in the home of the unstable Carol Alt, who has just murdered her husband in cold blood and is now taking a shower with his dead body in the tub with her. Anyway, Zach Galligan, charged by the bad guy from Revenge of the Ninja with bringing in the cyborg, realizes after Hagen and Cool Moe Dee's failures, that he needs to call in the big guns, i.e. Rick Hill. Now it's on.



Let me use an analogy to explain how this movie works. Just bear with me, it'll be quick. Think of it as a party one your buddies/girlfriends drags you to, that you decide "hey, I ain't got anything else goin' on on a Saturday, why not?", only you get there, and you're thinking maybe you should've stayed in an caught up on your Dickens, because this thing ain't workin'. The chicks/dudes are either not that hot, or have significant others they can't stop talking about, the music sucks, and the company is almost worse. You go to the fridge, because you need a beer quick and fast, and it's as you start getting that bad boy in your system, that someone tells you "hey man, did you know Rick Hill is supposed to be coming?" Rick Hill? Oh man, that guy is awesome. Now this will be a party. And sure enough, he shows up, and kills it. We're talking things like leading the group in singing some Dokken, bowling with an empty half-gallon Bacardi bottle into the party-holder's cheap golfing trophies, prank calls, body shots with the previously unappealing members of the opposite sex-- whatever else you can think of. Then, like any other cool dude, he leaves early, because one should never be the first to get there or the last to leave, and that's it. But you've had a great night, with tons of stories, and you're glad you didn't stay in and catch up on your Dickens.

And that's it in a nutshell (or a rather large, paragraph-long analogy). The moment I see Rick Hill's name in the opening credits, I'm waiting, watching the front door, for him to get there. And when he does, he more than doesn't disappoint, he's pure gold. No one in this film was able to handle this awful DTV movie material like he was. Okay, Ross Hagen was good too, but he's in the movie for like five minutes, so that doesn't count. I realized that, like that life of the party guy I described, I had taken Rick Hill and what he does for granted all this time. Maybe because it's been too long since I've seen Deathstalker-- something I plan to remedy soon!-- but I found in Storm Trooper, as everyone else seemed so out of place, reciting the bad dialog filled with non sequiturs without a clue as to how bad it sounded, here's Rick Hill, completely comfortable and affable, reminding me why I go for movies like this. Here's to you Rick Hill, you're one of the great ones.



That's Corey Feldman with an eye patch. I wish I could remember off hand the noise he made after Rick Hill kicked him in the stomach, it was like an air compressor or something, but even funnier. Even though his name is all over the cover, he's not in this much, a bit of a Feldman bait-and-switch. I will say, after Rick Hill and Ross Hagen, he was the next most comfortable in working with what this movie was giving, so that was a good thing. I think, even though he's barely in this, seeing him in it with an eye patch like this has to be worth it for Feldman fans. Maybe for Corey Haim fans too.

This is only our second Ross Hagen film, the other being Alienator, and that one had much more Hagen than this one did, because he's only in this one for like five minutes. Have you seen his imdb picture? He looks like Charlton Heston. You probably know him more for his MST3K movies, like Sidehackers and The Hellcats. He's actually still making movies and acting, his most recent work lending his voice for the too sweet video game Red Dead Redemption, as London Ricketts. Another of his more recent ones was in 1999, he played Det. Crank Gabovsky in a Skin-a-max flick directed by this film's director, Jim Wynorski, who's kind of in that Fred Olen Ray category of director who does everything from Skin-a-max to low-budget action. (In fact, Olen Ray did Alienator.) Anyway, I saw that on his imdb filmography, with that character name, Crank Gabovsky, and new I had to mention it.



Your guess is as good as mine as far as Carol Alt went in this. The character made no sense, and she made it make even less sense the way she played it, maybe because as a not so experienced actress, she didn't know what to do with what they gave her. Anyway, it was fitting then, the way they decided to end it, because it's almost as if they gave up too, and just threw the baby out with the bathwater. In a way, it worked, because, if you go with the party analogy, the life of it, Rick Hill, had already exited, so why not have a reminder that it's probably time for you to call it a night too, before things get any weirder-- that chick/dude you've latched onto, don't ignore the red flags, he/she is that unstable! Cut your losses and be happy with the Rick Hill.

And that's the crux of it. Rick Hill or bust, but it's definitely not bust with Rick Hill this time around. Considering you can get this on Netflix, it's not a bad deal. All the other names range from all right to not that great, but only one name matters, and he delivers. Also, if you haven't already, go check out Mr. Gable's Reality.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145495/

Alienator (1989)

I saw this listed on Encore Action, and felt it deserved a try. It said it had Ross Hagen, which, for anyone who's a MSTie like me, is known better as Rommel from Sidehackers and Chapman in Hellcats. Upon viewing, I was pleasantly surprised to find it also had Jan-Michael Vincent, and the guy who played Calgon in Space Mutiny: a real MST3K double.

Alienator, upon first blush, appears to take place in the future. An evil dictatorship, of which Jan-Michael Vincent is a higher up, has arrested dissident Ross Hagen, and plans to execute him. Stuff goes wrong, and an apparent bleeding heart liberal, who is there to oversee the execution, seems pleased when Hagen escapes. That's when things get weird. Hagen jumps in a pod and flies to Earth. In fact, this film takes place in the present time, and the people on the ship are all aliens (aliens that look like humans). Anyway, he lands in the woods, and is chased by a buff android woman. Four teenagers run into her along with the game warden, played by Calgon. Ross convinces them to protect him and fight the android. They short circuit it with chicken wire, and think they've won. Then Hagen shows he's evil, and he somehow kills one of the kids (the most annoying, luckily) and then transports himself into his body. Not sure how it works, but fortunately for Calgon, the android chick isn't dead, and she chops off Hagen's head. Oh by the way, that liberal was Hagen's dad, and Jan-Michael Vincent had to kill him too.



This film is bad. MST3K bad, which is fitting, because it has so many alumni (well, two). When people talk about bad movies, this is the kind of thing they're talking about. This is like on par with Space Mutiny and Future Wars. Horrible special effects, plot that makes no sense, infinitesimal acting skills: in short, very hard on the eyes. If you finish this one with your soul intact, you feel like you've done something big, like hike Mt. Whitney or something.

I was shocked to know that Ross Hagen still made movies. I figured Sidehackers and Hellcats were just passing fads for him. I guess what I'm saying is, how could he put those on his resume and still get work? But of course, if what we call work is fare like Alienator, I guess those other movies are just what the film makers are looking for.

Calgon plays a good guy in this. For those familiar with him from Space Mutiny, this may seem hard to take. What I did, to make it easier, was just simply not accept that he wasn't Calgon. It's not like the movie mattered enough for it to be an issue, and, if anything, it made it easier to take. This really was a hard ride.



Teagan Clive plays the android, who according to imdb, is the Alienator. She's not as hot as the Latin chick (one of the teenagers), but she's intriguing. She's a female bodybuilder, and it shows in the barely-there outfit she wears. The film would've been way better if there had been some sexual tension between her and Calgon, but morons who make movies like these aren't able to fathom the kind of nuance like that that we as the viewing audience would love to see.

I'll be honest, I'm a pretty experienced bad movie watcher, and I think this may have been above even my pay grade. My buddies and I could take it, but it's really meant for experts like the pros at MST3K. If you think you're up to the challenge, then by all means, give it a shot. You may be lucky enough to find it on TV again. If not, don't spend more than $2 on it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096786/