Save Me (1994)

This is one I covered on a two-part episode with Jon Cross from The PM Entertainment Podcast and the After Movie Diner back in November, number 184 (part 2) in the archives, when we looked at a couple of Harry Hamlin erotic thrillers. The other thing is this is Cole S. McKay's 60th film on the site! That makes him our third member of the 60 Club, and ties him with Gary Daniels for second-most ever, behind Dolph.

Save Me has Harry Hamlin as an investment broker whose wife (Olivia Hussey) has left him and taken their son with her. Also, he was the top broker at the firm, so he's been able to coast on that reputation and do very little work since then. Anyway, one day he's out on his lunch break, and he sees a gorgeous woman (Lysette Anthony) go into a lingerie shop, so he follows her and spies on her. After another time, she gives him a note that says "Save Me" with a phone number on it. Seems she's trying to get out from under the clutches of her abusive partner Michael Ironside, which Hamlin is only too happy to oblige her. He skips work or leaves early so he and her can hook up in his Mustang. But when will this Noir-ish femme fatale show Hamlin she's not all she seems?

This isn't horrible as a fun, time-killing watch. It pops in at around 90 minutes, you get some fun performances, and the "erotic" in "erotic thriller" is there sufficiently well, even if it's not full on Shannon Whirry Skin-a-max kind of stuff. The business aspects of the story are a bit of a trip though. Hamlin has a jerk for a colleague played by Steve Railsback, and at some point their boss, Joseph Campanella, promotes Railsback to Hamlin's manager. Railsback then puts Hamlin on a performance improvement plan, aka "probation," which would lead one to believe that means one more slip-up and he's out, but according to this movie, it means Hamlin's untouchable during the probation period? Like he can tell Railsback "fuck you," and Railsback can't do anything about it? And Hamlin's character isn't necessarily likeable either, he's just more likeable than Railsback. You almost get to a point where you want Anthony to smoke them all and move onto the next town. But therein lies the charm, maybe? The erotic thriller isn't meant to be compelling cinema, it's meant to get us to the church on time, and I think this one does that.

If it feels like we were just celebrating Cole S. McKay's entry in to the 50 Club, that would be right, the thing is, he had over 50 films when we finally decided to tag him, so he skipped the usual 30 and 40 Club posts and came in in the mid-50s. The plan was to review something more action-oriented, or maybe one of the films he directed or starred in, for this 60 Club post, but reviewing The Stray last week changed all of that, and I didn't realize until I started putting everything together for this post that it would be his 60th, but I figured I'd go with it instead of moving everything around. (I also discovered that Kill 'Em All 2, which I'd planned to do here, is now gated by Netflix and unavailable if you don't have an ad-free version? Do these streamers just get more ski mask and gun-y by the day?) Anyway, since we tagged him a few months back, McKay has been cruising up the all-time lists, first passing Art Camacho, now tied with Daniels, and I think passing him will only be a matter of time, since we don't have many Daniels films left to cover, and there could be over 100 other McKay films that qualify--just 1994 alone he has like 25 movies, of which we'll now have done 8. Just his PM stuff will probably push him past Dolph. And while this movie doesn't have a ton of stunts, the ones it does have, like the person trying to run Hamlin down in a parking garage, are all excellent. We take stunts in a film for granted, and I think a big reason for that is McKay and his teams always makes them look great. 60 Club and beyond!

I believe this is our first Harry Hamlin film on the site, but we have looked at him twice on podcast, one being the two-parter I mentioned above that includes this movie, episode 184 in the archives; and the other being episode 132, "Short Shots," where we looked at a series of short films with Rich Hawes from DTV Digest, and Hamlin was in a short film called One Clean Move, which also starred Gary Busey and Luca Bercovici. The thing about these erotic thriller roles is he seems like a drip a lot of times in them, which, after seeing him in Mad Men, makes me think was more by design than I realized. Did he read these scripts and think "this guy is kind of up his own ass" or "I don't know if I'd want to spend ten minutes with someone who acted like this" and then just leaned into it? Take this movie. It looks like his character barely does any work, and often can't even be bothered to finish his day sitting in the office. When his friend (played by Neil Ronco, who also wrote the script--but wasn't the guy who invented an As Seen on TV rotisserie cooker) invites him and Lysette Anthony up to their cabin to spend a weekend with Ronco and his wife, Hamlin proceeds to use it for as a sex escape bed and breakfast with Anthony, the two of them making the beast with two backs all over the place there. Yet Ronco continues to be this guy's best friend. It creates this gray area though where we don't know if we should root for Hamlin or not. Maybe it doesn't matter if we're just having fun.

This is not our first Lysette Anthony film on the site, that distinction goes to Strippers vs. Werewolves, but this is her first starring role. She's everything you want in that erotic thriller/film noir femme fatale. She's alluring, seemingly vulnerable, yet can be diabolical when it's needed. Another name we've seen here before is Michael Ironside, who plays the psychologist that's also Anthony's lover. We never know if we can believe him or not, because he's Ironside, exactly who you want in a role like this to be this mysterious. Then there's Steve Railsback, a name we've also seen here before, but I think this is my first mention of him. He's had a great DTV career that we haven't really even scratched the surface of, the kind of name that probably should be in the Hall of Fame if we'd been reviewing more of his films. I'll definitely look for more of them now. And finally, you may have noticed two other names we tagged, Kato Kaelin and Jesse V. Johnson. Kaelin plays a broker at the firm Hamlin and Railsback work at, but I couldn't find him in the movie so I wasn't able to get a screen. And then Johnson is listed as a set designer. It's a tag, and while it doesn't count toward his director tags, it adds to his overall count, which now stands at 15. Other names that round out the cast were Bill Nunn, Olivia Hussey, and Joseph Campanella. They all do great and add that much more flavor to the proceedings, which is what you want when you see their names in the cast list.

Finally, the title of this film gets the Aimee Mann song of the same name from the movie Magnolia stuck in my head. Her hit with 'Til Tuesday, "Voices Carry," is one of my favorite songs ever. I don't know if I can name ten songs that came out after it was released in 1985 that I like better than it. I tried to get into more of  'Til Tuesday's stuff, but none of their other songs really worked for me the way that one did. I remember one time VH-1 was playing 80s stuff, and the VJ said that, while he liked "Voices Carry," their album after that one, Welcome Home, was one of his "all-time faves." It was my first time hearing "favorites" truncated down to "faves" like that, and I found it intriguing. Like, I don't know if I've ever been able to use the term unironically myself, but I do use it quite a bit in a more ironic sense, and you'll find it from time to time here on the site, like in my The Most Dangerous Game review where I call CT "one of my faves from The Real World." It's funny how I pick up these little verbal affectations over time, and how much they've become embedded in my speech, but yet how I also remember exactly where I got many of them from, all these years later.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi here in the States. Sometimes you just need a 90s Erotic Thriller with names you know, and this is one that'll get you to the church on time. (If you're wondering where I got that expression from, you should listen to more David Bowie.) And for the podcast episode on this that I did with Jon Cross, you can check out episode 184 in the archives, parts 1 and 2.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108045

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

Made Men (1999)

Back on DTVC podcast episode 113, "Two Non Bonds," I had Will from Exploding Helicopter on to chat about two films that had former James Bonds in them, and this film, featuring Timothy Dalton, was one of the two we chose. If you haven't checked it out yet, you can find it in our archives, it was a fun conversation.

Made Men has the great Jim Belushi as a former mob guy who stole $12 million and then testified against his boss, so before anyone could find out where the money was, he was put into witness protection. The film starts with some of the mobster's hit men coming to take Belushi away, but when they bump into local sheriff Timothy Dalton, things start to go haywire, and only get worse when Belushi escapes, and the hit men chase him to meth cooker Steve Railsback's, shack in the woods. Now it's a series of shootouts and double-crosses, with character's like Michael Beach's not exactly being who they seem, and all the while Belushi's character vacillates between guy you want to love, and guy you can't stand. In the end, who will end up with the money?

This is a fun late 90s romp, essentially made fun by Belushi's performance, plus Dalton's as the sheriff. Belushi seems to make his character unlikeable by design, and just as we think we may like him, he does something bad. Dalton is just chewing scenery and loving every minute of it as the small town sheriff, but he's also a little sadistic too, which makes it more intriguing. Juxtaposed with all these characters, we have Michael Beach as something of a straight man, because, if we didn't have him, we'd have no one to relate to, and he helps to anchor us among all the craziness. All in all this is just a fun 90s organized crime romp.

Back in October of 2021 I did Royce on Will's Exploding Helicopter podcast--if you're not subscribed to that too, you should be--and on it, I discovered, I kind of like Jim Belushi. Why is that so shocking? I wondered myself, and when we watched this, I enjoyed him here too. In my head I decided it was just that he played a standard, doughy, white, Boomer dad on national TV, something safe and fun for middle America in flyover country, and I associated him with that image. But then for this review, I went back to my K9: PI review, from all the way back in August of 2007, and read this that I wrote then: 

"I've never understood the whole Belushi thing. I don't see how he not only gets work, but network sitcoms, and not only network sitcoms, but ones that people watch enough so that they stay on the air beyond the pilot. I asked my friends, to see if maybe it was just me, but it seemed unanimous that people think he's a tool. I'm sure as a dude in real life he's probably not so bad, but as an actor and funny man, it just ain't there. In fact, it's beyond not there, it actually hurts a little."

Did I say that? K9:PI was a rough one, and at that time, when the blog was just starting, I tended to go heavier in my opinions, and Belushi took the brunt of the pain I endured for that one. We all grow as people though, and 28-year-old me is different from 44-year-old me, and my tastes have changed. Like when I was a kid and I hated pickles and mustard, and now I need both on my burger. Jim Belushi is my pickles and mustard now I guess.

Timothy Dalton was the reason I was watching this though, not Belushi, and he didn't disappoint either. I knew he could do comedy, like when he did The Beautician and the Beast, but in that he was more of a straight man, and this was more of a scenery-chewing fun character. I haven't seen License to Kill in probably 30 years, and I've never seen The Living Daylights--though it has a great theme song by A-ha--so I think they could both use a rewatch. Interestingly enough, only The Living Daylights is part of a streaming package I subscribe to, HBOMax, while somehow License to Kill isn't part of any of the major ones--according to Letterboxd it's on Paramount+ on Apple+, which apparently is different from the Paramount+ I subscribe to, because it's not on that. How are they not all in one place so you could do a marathon of them? Especially for someone like me who's barely seen any of them? Come one streamers, get your act together.

Surprisingly, of all the names in this, Michael Beach was the one who was already tagged, having been in two movies on the site, the last almost ten years ago to the day of this posting on June 19th of 2013 when we looked at Assassins Tale as one of the screeners we received from Kevin at MTI video at that time. When we first see him as part of the mobster's goon squad coming to take Belushi, we know from experience that Beach generally isn't in a movie with a role like that, and sure enough we find out there's more to him as the film goes on. As I mentioned above, what he does best here is plays the straight man, or anchor to keep us grounded while we're dealing with all these cooky characters. Near the end, when he has Belushi at gun point and he wants the money, he loses his patience, the same way we as an audience have lost our patience with Belushi's character and his constant lying and messing around. It was one of those performances that I didn't realize I needed until after I'd watched it and was discussing the film further, but it was very necessary, and Beach did great with it.

Finally, when you go to the IMDb page for this film, under film connections it mentions three sequels that, when I looked them up, seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with this film. I looked up the director of those three films, Steve Rahaman, thinking maybe he did a film called Made Men too that this was confused with, but he didn't. It's one of the more fascinating things about IMDb, that you can edit the site on your own, so is this a case where a filmmaker is attaching his films to another film in the hopes that people will come across his films? Or did some random person just add those films to the connections page thinking they belonged together. It worked for me, because I was curious enough and looked up the films and Rahaman's other work. IMDb is a bit like the Wild West, but we movie bloggers and reviewers rely on it for so much. Look at Don "The Dragon" Wilson, who had films listed on his IMDb bio that were subsequently removed. That brought his tag count down, and has delayed his entry into the 40 Club; and it lowered his exploding helicopter film count on Will's site. I guess to some extent, we need to take what we see on IMDb with a grain of salt.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can get this on VHS, DVD outside the US, and, the way I did it, on YouTube. As you can see from my images, the YouTube version is only so good, but it'll get you to the church on time. And if you haven't yet, check out the podcast episode I did with Will that covered this, 113 in the archives, "Two Non Bonds," where we discuss this and the Pierce Brosnan film Live Wire.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175877

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

Deadly Intent (1988)

This is another in our Netflix Dump 8, which came in April of 2013 when Netflix dumped a huge cache of low-budget flicks from the Instant catalog.  I targeted 8 films I wanted to do here at the DTVC, and this one in particular because it has DTVC Hall of Famer Fred Williamson, plus DTVC favorites Lance Henriksen and Persis Khambatta.  Do we need any more reason to review a film?

Deadly Intent is about a woman, played by Lisa Eilbacher, whose jerk husband, Lance Henriksen, dies in a car accident after returning from a big archaeological expedition in South America.  That's when the fun starts, because it turned out Henriksen smuggled a massive jewel back with him, and all kinds of crazy characters are coming out of the woodwork for it.  This spells trouble for poor Eilbacher, who has no idea what they're talking about, no one she can trust, and a whole host of shady people threatening her life.  Will she make it out alive?



This is a bit of a slow-burner, definite Noir-ish suspense yarn, which might make it a little tough for some.  Also, Henriksen, Williamson, and Khambatta have small parts.  Even Steve Railsback, who plays Henriksen's buddy and Eilbacher's love interest, isn't in it as much as you'd think.  This is really Eilbacher's movie, and I think she's definitely good in it, but if you're coming to it for those other people, don't expect to see them as much.  We're stuck though, because, while this isn't exactly bad, it's rather unremarkable as well, so what does that mean for you?  I say it's not a bad 2AM cable insomnia deal, otherwise it's nothing special.

Fred Williamson plays a guy who, with Persis Khambatta, is an old colleague of Henriksen, and they have a few scenes early on stalking Eilbacher and killing a friend of hers.  At the end they have a bigger scene when they kidnap Eilbacher and hold her until their boss, Maud Adams, shows up to interrogate her.  That's where we get the best Williamson, and it's pure, fantastic Williamson.  Sometimes, when we're talking about an 83-minute Noir-ish suspense yarn from 1988, ten minutes of good Williamson is all you need to make it worth it.  We've seen better Williamson films, but this one isn't bad, and I liked it.



Even in 1988, Lance Henriksen was Lance Henriksen.  The disappointment of course is that he's killed off rather early on, especially when he's tearing things up so well at the beginning.  The thing is though, his character needed to be played by someone with a screen presence like his, because he casts such a large shadow over the story, even as a dead character, and in that sense Henriksen is great.  I guess I can accept less Henriksen in that case.

Some of the others in this included the aforementioned Persis Khambatta, who is great as Williamson's partner/spouse.  She's in the film slightly less than him, because she's offed slightly sooner.  Steve Railsback as Henriksen's friend and Eilbacher's love interest was about as Steve Railsback-y as you can imagine.  It's funny, because I would've loved to have seen he and Henriksen interact on-screen some, because that would've made the movie more fun, so we were robbed of that opportunity unfortunately.  Maud Adams played the curator of the museum who bought Henriksen's archaeological finds.  She was very sinister in that Noir-ish black widow kind of way, though her role was very different because our hero was a heroine, in this case Eilbacher, which made it more interesting.  Finally, the late David Dukes played a priest/con man/jewel fence, who, with his nun partner, was a lot of fun to see.  It's characters like that that make movies like this work.



Finally, I picked this photo of Lisa Elibacher in the film because it's near the end, and it demonstrates how much her character was sent through the ringer.  We often see the Hitchcockian-Noir theme of the man who is thrust into a situation and a world he has no clue about, so it was different to see a woman in that role.  Sometimes she takes some agency in trying to fight her situation, while at others she just wants to be left alone, and by the time we get here, when she's chased down and wrestled to the ground by Khambatta, then tied up and gagged by Williamson, who later menaces and mocks her, she's had it.  The whole film actually felt a bit before it's time.  This could have been a mid-90s indie Neo Noir, and who knows, maybe if it had been made then, it would've had more life than a 1988 DTV flick.

So, again, nothing overly remarkable about this film, but it's a good 2AM cable TV insomnia flick, or as I used to say when I first started this blog over six years ago, something you can check out while procrastinating on a term paper.  Now I'm just an old guy who drinks tea in the evening and is in bed by midnight-- making sure I watch Matlock first, of course.  No more term papers though.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094970/

The Wind (1987)

Always looking to get more Wings Hauser on the DTVC, and finding this one available on DVD from Netflix, I decided to go for it. Then I pull the sleeve out of the envelope, and see "1 hr. 52 min." for the running time. A buck-52? That's crazy! Luckily enough, it was bad info (you can never trust the Netflix running time-- or the synopsis sometimes for that matter!), and the real running time was only 93 min. Phew.

The Wind stars Meg Foster as a mystery/pulp writer who vacations on a small Greek island to write her next book. It's very isolated, most of the residents are away, and there's a lot of nasty wind everywhere, making things tough. Throw into that mix drifter Wings Hauser, working for the landlord of the place Foster's staying at, who doesn't take his boss firing him too well-- i.e. he beats him to death with a poker. After he catches Foster catching him burying the body, it's now a deadly game of cat and mouse. Will she survive the wind and the Wings?



This could've been better. It had a bit of a dead spot around the hour mark for 10-15 minutes, and then had a natural ending at 80 minutes that director Nico Mastorakis decided to forgo in favor of stretching the film out for another superfluous 10 minutes. For a film like this, built mostly on suspense and ratcheting up the tension, dead spots and not knowing when to quit can be more grating than they might otherwise be in a bad horror or action flick. That's a shame, because otherwise this wasn't too bad. Hauser made a great baddie, Foster was great as the protagonist, and there was a nice mixture of Hitchcockian and horror elements that made this more than just a bad Lifetime movie type deal. Close, but not close enough I guess.

That's Wings Hauser if you need him. Absolutely 100% Wings as the psycho baddie, which is just the way we like him. He plays a really good nutjob, doesn't he? Oh yeah, and then there's the 'Stash. How do you not love a Wings 'Stash? Throw in the LL Bean Rockland Edition Lobster Fisherman's Sweater, and you have a pretty vintage Hauser deal here. Unfortunately, as the baddie, he doesn't get the maximum screen time, but he does his thing when he's there, and that's all we can ask.



One thing we often discuss here at the DTVC is how film makers waste certain cast members by not playing to their strengths, but Mastorakis doesn't do that here as far as Meg Foster goes. He knows one of her best and most intriguing features is her eyes, and he uses that to full effect, adding to the haunting atmosphere of the film. I don't know if the original storyboards called for all the close-ups on her eyes, or if Mastorakis made the role with her in mind, but if she was cast after the fact, he did a great job of mixing it up and taking advantage of a great opportunity afforded him there.

This is only the second Mastorakis film we've done at the DTVC, the other being another Wings flick, Nightmare at Noon. He just celebrated his 70th birthday about five days ago. He hasn't directed a film since 2002's .com for Murder, which has Huey Lewis in it. Yes, that Huey Lewis. Also, there's The Zero Boys, with DTVC favorite Joe Estevez. Not quite the prodigious directing credits of some of our other favorite directors, but not too bad either.



As a hiker, I have experienced some nasty wind myself a few times, including 60 MPH out near Mts. Sherman, Gemini, and Dyer in Colorado. It was pretty scary, especially on this saddle ridge between Gemini and Dyer that wasn't very wide and was steep on both sides. When it gets that rough, all you can really do is crouch down and let the gusts pass. This movie reminded me of some of that, though, despite the film's title, it seemed like more of a nuisance than a major impediment. Even Wings was the one who cut the power to the house, not the elements. Maybe it should've been called "The Wings".

This is available on DVD from Netflix, which is a rarity for something of its kind. I've also seen it in two-packs and multi-packs in bargain bins, so depending on what it's with, it might not be too bad. By itself, and at too high a cost, it's probably not quite worth it, even with the Wings factor.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094327/

The Hitcher II: I've Been Waiting (2003)

I'm a huge C. Thomas Howell guy. No one else who votes on the DTVC Hall of Fame is, so he's been frozen out, at least for now. I bought this movie on the cheap at BestBuy partly for C. Thomas Howell, and partly because The Hitcher with Rutger Hauer (a real DTVC Hall of Famer) was one mine and my friends' favorite movies growing up. No, I haven't seen the remake that came out recently, should I?

The Hitcher II: I've Been Waiting takes place a while after the first one. C. Thomas Howell is having trouble getting over what happened, which is very understandable. Kari Wuher, his woman, thinks he should be getting over it faster, which doesn't really make any sense, because what Rutger did to him in the first movie was pretty traumatizing. Anyway, they decide to take a vacation to get away from it all. Howell is murdered by the new Hitcher, played by Jake Busey, and now Wuher must sub in for Howell and remake the first movie.

I didn't go into this movie with high expectations, and I still was let down. First, Howell was killed off early. I couldn't believe it. Why am I watching it then? Busey wasn't bad as the new Hitcher, but he also isn't Rutger Hauer. Part of the allure of the first movie was the advanced age of the killer--like he could almost be a twisted father figure to Howell. Maybe they should've gotten Jake's dad, Gary, instead, or even Dennis Hopper. Then we'd all be happy.

This isn't really a sequel, it's a cheap remake sans anyone worth watching. Jake Busey and Kari Wuher are great extra people to throw in, but I need someone big, like a Hopper, or a Hauer. I was expecting C. Thomas Howell, but the movie makers were arrogant enough to think they could pull this off without him. They were wrong. Dead Wrong.

Don't waste your time on this sack of asscrack. I'm not even talking about spending money on it, I'm saying don't waste the hour-and-a-half of your life. Don't see it for free. Watch something you've already seen before, like the episode of SportsCenter you just sat through. Or watch something you've never seen, like a soccer game, or a mini-marathon of Laguna Beach. Whatever you do, don't watch this.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299988/

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