Dragstrip Girl (1994)

When I saw this movie I thought it would be perfect for my Mark Dacascos review as we try to get him into the 30 Club. It was directed by Mary Lambert, one of my favorite directors and someone whose work I've wanted to cover more of, and despite the fact that it was a TV movie, I figured direct-to-Showtime and direct-to-video are pretty similar. Then I discovered this movie was part of a series of movies on Showtime called Rebel Highway, so it's even more like a TV series than a DTV movie. I guess my rules were made to be broken, so why not?

Dragstrip Girl is not a remake of the 1957 film, but rather is about young man named Johnny (Dacascos) who dreams of leaving the world he inhabits as a Mexican American in 1950s Los Angeles, to join the rich elite he sees when he parks their cars at their fancy clubs. In particular he's taken a shine to high school girl Laura Bickford (Natasha Wagner Gregson), and concocts a way to lie and con her into loving him. At the same time, to sell his lie, he's stolen a nice car, and the cops are looking for it. As he gets the girl, everything else crashes down around him. Will he manage to make it all work?

This was a fascinating movie. As someone who enjoys the source material, 1950s low-budget genre movies, it felt like Mary Lambert nailed a lot of it, including the bad parts, like the loose ends of the story flying together in the last five minutes, or the massive both figurative and literal right turn the thing takes at the end. The other thing I appreciated in both her direction and Jerome Gary's writing was the ambiguity in Johnny, which Dacascos pulled off well in his performance. There are times where we root for him, which makes sense with him as the lead, but also plenty of times where we want Laura or his previous girlfriend Pearl (Maria Celedonio) to get away from him. And Lambert doesn't shy away from any of this, like when Johnny and Laura have sex, Laura says to him "don't ever lie to me," when Johnny knows full well he's been lying to her this whole time; but then Lambert takes these issues regarding consent where a 21-year-old has conned a 16-year-old into being with him, and while in the construct of this movie is brushing them aside with Laura telling Johnny after the fact "you should've just told me the truth," but she still loves him, we still feel that lack of consent and manipulation hanging over things. The other part of this is Johnny's identity, and Lambert doesn't shy away from that either, as Johnny aspires to be a part of this rich, white world, he's casting aside Pearl for the symbol of that rich, white world, Laura, but Pearl doesn't disappear from the film, reminding us of what Johnny is forsaking in his aspirations, which, again, makes us not want to root for him. It definitely has its flaws, and whether those flaws are intended or not, they're there; but for me the ambiguity Lambert infuses into the whole thing makes this work in a way other movies like it wouldn't.

I originally thought we were now at 25 films for Mark Dacascos, which would've meant I did my math out wrong for getting him in the 30 Club by the end of the year, because if we do one every other month from here out, that would've left us with 29 in November, meaning we'd've had to double up at some point. Then I discovered that we hadn't tagged him for his stunt work in Steele Justice, which means he's at 26, and we're on track for the 30 Club again. This is a unique role for him, no martial arts, a few stunts, but it was more about his acting, which I thought he did a great job with. He gets that Johnny is supposed to be someone we root for at points, but also be someone we look at and say "you're being kind of a jerk, Johnny," or "that behavior's kind of predatory, Johnny." Obviously we like seeing Dacascos show off his next level martial arts skills, but it's nice to see him hit a dramatic role out of the park too. What I would say to that though is, as a dramatic actor, he's good, but as a martial artist, he's one of the best to do it, which is what's always exciting to see from him.

We last saw Mary Lambert here on the site for Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, which was the only other film of hers we've reviewed. I've always known her more for her great music videos, but a film like this is a reason why I'm a huge fan too. In a way she refracts the light off of the lead character, Johnny, and shines it on his two love interests, Laura and Pearl. Not only does he treat them poorly, but they love him in spite of that, and Lambert gives us this without any judgement on either of them. Part of that is the performances too. Natasha Gregson Wagner really plays her character like she's 16, which is even starker when compared to Dacascos's character who's supposed to be 21, but feels older. She's sixteen and feels trapped in her world, and here comes this man in a fancy car to help her escape all that. She doesn't realize what's happening when Dacascos takes her to a Mexican restaurant where everyone he knows hangs out so he can show her off to them. At the same time Pearl is being treated poorly by Johnny too, but there's a part of her that thinks he'll come back to her once he's rejected by the rich white girl and her friends and family, and she thinks he's worth waiting for, even if he's treating her poorly in the process. I don't know if Lambert could've made this movie about Gregson and Celedonio's characters instead inside of this Rebel Highway construct, but I like the way she packaged it as a coming of age story about a guy while ultimately telling the story of the two female leads as well. In a way she subverts the story of the original Dragstrip Girl, which was supposed to be a girl who was a drag racer, but ends up being more about the two guys who have a thing for her.

This is our second Traci Lords film this month, which wasn't something I planned on, but I wanted to do both this film and Intent to Kill, so here we are. She plays Blanche, a friend of Dacascos and his brother Anthony's (Augusto Sandino) mother, and takes them in when she dies. She does a great job playing a high-end sex worker who has clients back to her place next door to them. The weird part is she's younger than Dacascos but playing older, but I can also see how she was right for this role, even if age-wise it was off. We also had Raymond Cruz, who is probably best known for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but he had one of the more prodigious CVs of anyone in the cast when this film was made, having been in Clear and Present Danger, and two Seagal films, Under Siege and Out for Justice. You could kind of see the seeds of Tuco Salamanca in this performance here, and I wondered if Vince Gilligan caught this on cable and was like "there's my Tuco Salamanca!" This wasn't his first time on the site either, all the way back in 2008 we reviewed From Dusk Till Dawn II: Texas Blood Money.

Finally, of all the videos Mary Lambert has directed, one I didn't expect was Boz Scaggs's "Heart of Mine," which was off his 1988 Adult Contempo come back album Other Roads. Why is that important? The song was written by one of my favorite artists, Bobby Caldwell, who was a friend of Scaggs, and Scaggs was the one who told him he could make money writing songs for other artists, like himself. I don't remember the song from when it was new, I knew it first from Caldwell's album of the same name, Heart of Mine, where he did his own versions of all the songs he wrote for other artists--one you might know is Al Jarreau's "All or Nothing at All." Anyway, going back to Scaggs, that album had all the hallmarks of that late 80s/early 90s Adult Contempo album from a singer who was big in another era, complete with him in the midlife crisis leather outfit while leaning on the equally midlife crisis-y sport bike on the cover. There were also a bunch of great artists on it, like David Paich, Jeff Pocaro, and Steve Lukather from Toto, and backing vocals from Phil Perry, Siedah Garrett, and James Ingram--who performed on "Heart of Mine." It was the kind of music Boomers of that era loved when they were entertaining--earlier in the evening, of course. Once the wine has kicked in after dinner though, they pulled out Silk Degrees from the collection and cranked "Lido Shuffle" while their teenage kids were rolling their eyes in their rooms upstairs. I'm joking about all this, but I'm older now than Scaggs was in 1988 when he donned that leather outfit and leaned on that motorcycle, knowing full well I'd have been yelling at the photographer "take the picture before I fall over! I can't stand like this anymore!"

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently this can be rented on Amazon, Xfinity, or other places you rent movies on demand. I don't know if it's worth a rental, but if it comes up on any streamers, I think it's worth checking out--and to be fair, it would be nice if all the Rebel Highway movies ended up on streamers, there were some other great directors involved in those, including William Friedkin.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109662

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

Intent to Kill (1992)

For this month's PM flick, I thought I'd do the last of the three early 90s PM flicks Traci Lords did that I needed to review. In addition to us, this is a Superfecta movie, because Christ the Brain at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, and Mitch at the Video Vacuum have all covered this; plus Jon Cross at the PM podcast did an episode on this as well.

Intent to Kill has Traci Lords as a cop on the edge. Her chief and mentor (Yaphet Kotto) wants her to be safe, so he takes her off the assignment she had to take down a Colombian drug cartel member (Angelo Tiffe), only to have her find more trouble elsewhere. Her live-in boyfriend (Scott Patterson) is a deez, dem, and doze Italian American from North Jersey who does his hair and slaps on cologne to get the paper so he can flirt with the neighbor who likes to ride her bike in her dental floss bikini. As you can imagine, she catches her beau in their waterbed with a lady he met at the bar, then proceeds to go Mitchell on his antique car he loves so much. Now it's on her to stop this Colombian and his cronies, only she not only has to deal with them, but her jealous ex that's trying to sabotage her career.

This one is a lot of fun. It's everything you want in a PM flick: a strong lead, great car flips and stunts, fun supporting stars, and this crazy PM world where danger is everywhere and our hero needs to shoot her way out of it at a moment's notice. At the same time, there's a lot you wouldn't expect about Lords's character being a woman in a man's world, and how even the people that want to help her succeed, like Yaphet Kotto's character, still impede her progress. The end was a little bit off for me, because Lords's character gets herself in a bad situation that wasn't consistent with how she was in the rest of the film, but I also understood it was their way of getting rid of Scott Patterson's character, and considering how he was, in PM world he had to go--hey hey, ho ho, Scott Patterson's got to go! You either like PM flicks or you don't, and if you do, this is right up your alley.

These three Traci Lords early 90s PM flicks all feature great performances by her, which is kind of crazy when you consider how young she was acting opposite all of these older guys. It's not just that she holds her own, it's believable that she would be the best and most capable among the older male characters she's acting opposite of. Looking at her career, in '95 she was starting to get parts on network TV shows like Melrose Place and Roseanne, and I think there was a sense that a bigger breakout was coming, but it never quite came, and she ended up coming back to PM to close out the decade with two more films. This is now her sixth film on the site, which doesn't sound like a lot, but there's a five-way tie for sixth most all-time among women on the site at seven movies, so she's one away from that, and we have another film coming this month with her in it, so she'll be hitting that in a couple weeks. The question from there is, is the Hall of Fame in sight? Everyone in the top five all-time for women on the site are in, and the bottom of that list is nine films, so I'd say it's in sight.

We're now at 56 PM films at the DTVC, which sounds like a lot, but we have another 50 or so to go to have them all, and if we're doing one a month, we won't get there until 2030, so we still have some work to do. This has a lot of what you want in a PM flick. For example, when Lords catches Patterson in bed with another woman, the bed is a waterbed. Like when Patterson runs after Lords, the woman he's sleeping with is bobbing up in down due to the waterbed waves. That alone is amazing, but then he chases Lords out to his car, where she proceeds to do a Mitchell with the woman's panties and the gas tank of his car, lighting the panties and blowing up the back of the car. How amazing is that? Only PM would think to do the waterbed/Mitchell combo like that, because they're probably the only ones who could pull it off. I also mentioned above the DP duo of Blakey and Pepin. We get these beautiful shots of the LA streets at night from Blakey, and then Pepin gives us these fantastic, clean looks of the action moments. Finally, we have the stunt team of Red Horton and "Broadway" Joe Murphy working on this one, combined with Scott McAboy as second unit director. It gives you that quality of PM you want when you fire one of these up and want to escape for 90 minutes.

What do you do with Yaphet Kotto in this? He's the police chief, he sits in his office and tells Lords she's causing so much trouble it's driving him to drink bourbon in the afternoon, yet when he sees her at the bar after she catches Patterson in bed with another woman, he proceeds to drink from her Bud Dry sitting in front of her, so maybe his character has more of a drinking problem beyond Lords's antics. He never leaves the station except for that visit to the bar, the rest of the time he's either in his office or out among the desks that the rest of the detectives are sitting at. We have seen Kotto before, in the Busey film Eye of the Tiger, and it's weird seeing him in stuff like this, but in looking at his IMDb bio, it's closer to 50-50 on the low-budget DTV stuff than you'd expect from someone who had the career he had. That then begs the question, is the Hall of Fame a possibility for Kotto? It looks like it's more in play than I expected.

Finally, going back to the cinematography, and just looking at PM films overall, they did more than just set their films in LA and shoot in LA, they made LA a character in their films the way we think of New York City as a character in movies. And I'm not talking about LA as a novelty location like in Beverly Hills Cop, or suburban LA like in License to Drive, but like really making the city of LA a character, using more local locations, and not being afraid to be specific. Like when Lords is following a lady of the night who was connected with one of the Colombians, we saw places like Frederick's of Hollywood, but in the context of a gritty Hollywood in the middle of the night. I think a lot of filmmakers and studios were afraid to give people that LA, thinking the audience wouldn't get it, but it feels like the PM folks didn't care, which I think is great. And now 30 years later it's a time capsule that we can go back and watch.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Fawesome, or there's a decent copy on YouTube too, which I added to my PM playlist on my YouTube channel. This is another good one from PM and Traci Lords, worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107222/

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

Ice (1994)

Recently Will from Exploding Helicopter mentioned his Lettrboxd list of films that have exploding helicopters in them (one of the best Letterboxd lists in my opinion) and I was sitting at a paltry 23% of them watched--of which 10% of those are Dolph and Daniels movies. In an effort to get some more of those films in, I'm doing one of the four PM flicks with exploding helicopters that I haven't watched yet. Also, this is a superfecta movie, because in addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof Action, Ty and Brett and Comeuppance, and Mitch at the Video Vacuum have covered this too.

Ice has Traci Lords as the wife in a husband and wife duo who rob ne'er-do-wells for insurance companies. They're hired to rob crime boss Vito Malta (Jorge Rivero), but then when her husband (Phillip Troy Linger) decides to keep the diamonds, all hell breaks loose. He gets the crazy grinchy idea of having Lords's estranged brother (Zach Galligan) fence them, but he's a mess and only gets them taken by a rival crime boss. When her husband is killed in a shootout, it looks like the only person Lords can trust is a local detective (Jaime Alba), who may or may not have a thing for her. Will she make it out alive?

This is a good ol' PM time. It starts with a robbery that was edited from the robbery in Ring of Fire II, which is why Evan Lurie is tagged--though not Ian Jacklin, even though I think he's in the scene too. Just tack on a little Michael Bailey Smith, and it's a totally different scene, right? From there, you have a great lead in Lords mixed with all the great PM moments you want, with exploding cars, that exploding helicopter I mentioned above, and a shootout at a semi-pro hockey game where multiple players are killed. Can you imagine, you grew up in the Northeast or Minnesota or Michigan or something like that, played some hockey in high school, move out to LA, and make it onto this semi-pro hockey team, only to be shot and killed by some mafiosos trying to get a bag of diamonds. Only in the world of PM, but it's such a sweet world, and we're happy to be living in it for 90 minutes.

We're now at 53 PM flicks on the site, which sounds like a lot, but I don't even think that's half-way through them all. It had been a while since we'd last done one, and in watching this I realized that was a mistake, I should be watching and reviewing at least one PM flick a month, because they're so good for the soul. We start with that opening robbery, which, as I mentioned above, was lifted from Ring of Fire II, but thinking about it from PM's standpoint, they'd think "how many people would've seen both of these movies, and then if they did, how would they be able to let everyone else know?" I mean, what was it in 1994, a BBS? Would there have even been a PM Entertainment BBS? I certainly wasn't looking for that kind of thing, I was asking my buddy to get all the moves to Mortal Kombat II--I remember how popular I was going to the arcade with the printout, complete with the sides of the paper that had the holes in it, showing everyone there the moves. So while I'm trying to do Mileena's Friendly, PM is laughing all the way to the bank after repurposing a robbery scene, and only thirty years later are we picking up on it, and we actually appreciate the ingenuity. It's all part of the PM charm, which is on full display in this one.

Art Camacho did fight choreography, making this his 57th film on the site, only three away from becoming the fourth member of the 60 Club. I think we have seven more of his PM collaborations left to do, but it's hard to know because he did so many different things for them, he might have other credits I didn't see when I scanned IMDb. And then for stunt coordinators, we had the team of Red Horton and "Broadway" Joe Murphy, one of the top PM teams along with Spiro Razatos and Cole S. McKay. I looked, and they should have 17 and 15 tags respectively, so I've taken care of that. That combination of Camacho with Horton and Murphy give us the action quotient we expect from PM, with some great shootouts, plus car flips and the helicopter explosion; and some great fight scenes, especially with Traci Lords. To complete the PM feel, we have Ken Blakey as DP/cinematographer. He makes sure the movie has the PM look we've come to know and love. We spoke above about how if you watch a lot of PM flicks, you notice things like them reusing scenes from previous movies, but also, this consistency with the look and the action creates this comfort food vibe, when you see that PM logo before the film starts, it's like smelling that burger on the grill at your favorite burger joint, and the first flipped car or person sent through a glass window is that first, juicy bite. Is that the best metaphor for PM? They're the Double-Double Animal Style of movie studios?

We're now at 5 movies for Traci Lords, three of which are PM flicks. Like the last one we talked about from her, A Time to Die, she's the star, and does a great job leading the film. Also like that film, it's kind of crazy to see her in her early 20s acting opposite these men who are ten and twenty years older than her, and not only holding her own, but in some cases making it look like these guys aren't in her league. There was a definite It Factor there that I guess never quite materialized, but in the early-to-mid 90s she had some great DTV stuff, much of which we still need to get to. Among the other names, I thought this was only our second Zach Galligan film, after Cyborg III: The Recycler, but I forgot he was also in Point Doom (directed by Art Camacho), and Storm Trooper (which if you haven't checked, has a great IMDb critics review page. Four reviews, ours, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, Mitch at the Video Vacuum, and The Schlock Pit. Where are the guys from Comeuppance on that one?) He's great as the scam artist brother who's always getting into stuff. Michael Bailey Smith is here for his 8th time. Always great to see him, and it was also great that the new Fantastic Four movie gave him a cameo considering his great work as the Thing in the Corman version. Finally, Evan Lurie gets a 12th tag from his archive footage appearance in the Ring of Fire II robbery scene. It looks like we have one more movie for him, Death Game aka Mortal Challenge, and then we'll have his entire filmography covered.

Finally, we have a classic Taco Bell logo sighting. It was across the street from the hockey rink Zach Galligan kept the missing diamonds in. Here in Philly it's one of the few fast food places still in Center City, so I enjoy grabbing something there while I'm running errands. When this movie came out though, we had a location in the Fox Run Mall in Newington, NH, and back then you could get hard shell tacos for $.49 a piece. With a $10 allowance, I could do 4 tacos, and still had over $7 left to play Mortal Kombat until my parents or my friends' parents came to pick me up. It still is a pretty good deal, for $6 I can get three hard shell tacos, and while I was comparing PM to In-N-Out Burger, I like that I can swap the ground beef for black beans and remove the cheese for one of the few vegan fast food options. Add in some fire sauce and it's a nice slice of all right. As far as the Fox Run Mall, it's slated for demolition early next year, but I was able to go in one last time and get some pictures.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Plex or the Roku Channel here in the States, which I think is a good way to go. A fun PM flick, plus you can check another film with an exploding helicopter off your list. What's not to love?

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107182

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

A Time to Die (1991)

With the unfortunate passing of Richard Roundtree, I wanted to do a post in honor of him, and saw that this PM flick he was in is available on YouTube, so I figured I'd make it happen. In addition to us, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, and Simon at Explosive action have all covered this--and in addition to them, IMDb says Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide have also covered this, but the links on the critic reviews page are no good.

A Time to Die has Traci Lords as a fashion photographer who was set up in a drug bust and now has to take pictures for the LAPD for her community service. She also has a son living with her estranged husband that she wants to gain custody of again. One night, on a date with detective Jeff Conaway, she sees the guy who busted her, Robert Miano, and decides to follow him after he leaves. She ends up catching him killing a pimp, and she has all the juicy pictures of it. She has no idea how high in the department this conspiracy goes, so she keeps it to herself, and hopes to use it to blackmail Miano into clearing her name. That should work out well.

This is another fun PM flick. It's right around the time Ring of Fire comes out, so has more of that less action early period PM feel than the full-on exploding car flips every ten minutes feel we're used to with them, but we still do get our exploding car flip, so there's that. Traci Lords also puts in a great performance, which really anchors things; plus Roundtree, despite being relegated to angry police chief--full mustache and all--elevates that part to something more, which adds to the proceedings. On top of that, you have Miano as a great baddie, and the novelty of Jeff Conaway is as good as you'd want--even if he seems a bit handsy with Lords, more on that later; not to mention we have the classic PM quirks, like an angry lesbian couple that seem to always be in trouble with the law, Lords's son who wears business suits to school, and a fashion shoot Lords does with two models who do some choreographed dance routine while she takes their pictures. If you're looking for a fun 90s thriller, this is worth checking out.

While Roundtree's part wasn't big here, it was pure Roundtree, total leading man, commanding every scene he's in, so much so that I thought he was going to end up having a bigger role in this than he did. And I think that's the biggest travesty of his career, is that he didn't get more of those major leading roles, and while Hollywood's loss was our gain with films like this, it was also our loss too, because it would've been great for us to see him in those major leading roles too. Roles that his contemporaries got, like Harrison Ford or Michael Douglas, but that weren't made available to African American actors at the time like they would be later for Denzel Washington or Will Smith. And as great as those actors are, Roundtree was another level of leading man above them. Still, his iconic turn as Shaft to me is up there with Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, or Christopher Reeve as Superman--imagine if Marvel had been more on top of their film adaptations in the 70s and made a Black Panther film then with Roundtree in the lead? And that's the legacy Roundtree leaves behind, perhaps he didn't get the roles a star with his screen presence deserved, but the roles he did get, he hit out of the park, especially Shaft, and with it he influenced a generation of action film fans like myself, because I don't think I'd be here writing this blog if it weren't for TNT showing all the Shaft films in the early 90s.

The star of the film is Traci Lords, with this being the first of three films she did for PM in the early 90s. It's crazy to think she was only 23 here, as she's playing someone older, maybe like late 20s/early 30s with an established career, ex-husband, and a child. She's already holding her own at this age in scenes with Roundtree and Miano, let alone someone like Conaway. We all know Traci Lords's story with her start in the Gentleman's Cinema industry, but she wouldn't have been able to successfully pivot her career after the way she has if she didn't have the talent to pull it off, which she shows here. This is only her fourth film on the site, which seems low because she's done a lot of direct to video stuff, but in looking at her bio, a lot of it is stuff like this, where she's the lead, or if she isn't there aren't the kinds of names in it that get us to post, like Dolph or Rothrock. Considering she has two more PM flicks we'll have to do, that'll give us a start to get more of her stuff on here for sure, and I think with Shannon Tweed getting into the Hall of Fame this year, she's a candidate for a future induction herself.

In addition to her, we had Jeff Conaway and Robert Miano. Conaway played this drippy detective who's always trying to hook up with Lords, and eventually she does hook up with him. As I mentioned above, he's very handsy with her, which seems off given the disparity in their ages, but I'm sure he passed it off as "I'm just getting into character baby!" A total 70s icon who's star had pretty much faded by this point, but that's why we come to films like this, to see our favorite 70s icons make a go of it, especially after those Taxi royalty checks have been blown that month and they need a little extra bread. With Miano, I realized that I hadn't gone back and updated his tag, so he went from three films to 13, with now this movie being his 14th. He's great in this role as the creepy, villainous dirty cop, walking around with his rubber gloves on and his gun with the silencer ready to cause trouble. With now 14 on the site, I don't know if the Hall of Fame is coming, since he doesn't have a lot of starring roles, but with the amount of work he still does, I could see us doing another 16 that just happen to have him in them and him getting in on The Asylum Rule.

Usually we discuss the film's on Hall of Famer in the first post, but it worked out better that we finish with them. We're now at 43 PM flicks on the site, which puts them in a tie with Cannon for most from a studio. Between what I have in the hopper for each, PM will pass them soon, and after that it's onto the 50 Club. According to IMDb, this is the 20th film from PM, but as I mentioned above, it looks like it came out right after Ring of Fire, which to me signaled a start in the shift from thrillers like this with some action elements in it, to full on actioners, and when that shift happens, that's when we start getting those PM flicks that are some of the best actioners of the 90s, which makes PM that proper replacement to Cannon in the world of low-budget action. But even being something that wasn't a full on actioner, there's still a lot of fun to be had, which is what I love about PM flicks, chances are I'm going to get 90 minutes of fun, something that's not always a given nowadays.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can catch this on YouTube. The version isn't horrible, so I think it's worth it--and it's one I have added to my PM playlist on my DTV Connoisseur YouTube channel. As far as Richard Roundtree, he truly was one of the best to do it, and will be greatly missed. Here's to you Mr. Roundtree.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103090

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

Princess of Mars (2009)

When I found this on Netflix Watch Instantly, I thought, wow, an Asylum picture not meant to capitalize on a blockbuster in the theater. Turns out I was wrong. Princess of Mars is based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs book of the same name, and that book was supposed to be in part the inspiration for Avatar, which The Asylum made sure was plastered on the DVD's cover. What I wonder is whether or not Dances With Wolves also has on its DVD cover "Movie Cameron ripped off to make Avatar"?

Princess of Mars is about a soldier in Afghanistan played by Antonio Sabato Jr. who is shot multiple times and almost killed. The Army decides to take the info they have of his body on a flashdrive, and use that info to teleport him to Mars 216, a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri that the government thinks might have life on it. When he gets there, he finds he has special powers due to the planet's gravity, then is captured by these lizard people. He earns their respect by fighting alongside of them, only to find they don't like the humans on the planet. When they capture the princess, Traci Lords, Sabato tries to build peace between both sides, though he has trouble when a mysterious man gets in his way. Who is this guy?



Because this is based on a book, I'm not sure who I can blame for my number one issue with the film, so I'll just put it out there, and if anyone's read it, they can tell me. For the first hour, I thought this might be one of the best Asylum films I've seen. I know that's not saying much, but still. It felt like a classic Steve Reeves Hercules film, and it was a lot of fun. Then we get to the lizard people's castle, and their leader has a bunch of human women with their eyes gouged out and eyelids stitched over. What? Weird weird weird. I don't know if it was in the book to begin with, or if The Asylum added it, but it was just weird. I think The Asylum should've seen that and changed it if it was Burrough's originally, but can we be surprised The Asylum didn't? They seem to revel in weirdness when it's the most inappropriate.

It was just such a disappointment, because it was only maybe five total minutes in the film, but considering the only thing the film was selling was fun, doing something like that rips all the fun out of it. Antonio Sabato Jr. was great as the hero. He had elements of Reeves, but he also really made it his own too. Lords was also great as the princess. And I loved the bad effects and the lizard people too. What is the point of killing it all? They had to be checking the dailies and seeing the tone the film was taking. Ride it, don't kill it.



I don't think we have any other Antonio Sabato Jr. on here, though he does have some other DTV roles. He worked perfectly fine here, so maybe I'll check some more of those out. He had a way of delivering lines in a clean, tongue-in-cheek way that enhanced the overall mood of the film, and almost transcended the film's major shortcoming. If The Asylum makes movies of the book's sequels, I hope they keep Sabato, and I hope Sabato says yes. (Sounds like his reality show, My Antonio, which I loved the title to, playing off the Willa Cather novel My Antonia.)

After having our first Asylum bait-and-switch in our The Day the Earth Stopped review, we now have two in a row, only this time it's a planet bait-and-switch. That's right, Mars on the cover, but watching the film, I found out it was the fictitious planet Mars 216. I kind of dig this, though, because unlike the War of the Worlds Asylum films, which just seem out of touch with our current knowledge about Mars, this movie took it upon itself to invent a new planet, which I think is cooler. (I like the idea of using the real Mars too, because of Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system, sounds really awesome but I digress.) The interplay of two humanoid species only works on a new Mars, and that was a really cool idea as well. As an anthropology major, I've always dug the interplay between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, because it's the only time we had two human species interacting. Of course, as far as we know, there aren't any planets orbiting Alpha Centauri, at least none that have been seen, so there's that too.



She's back. After reviewing Epicenter and our first Traci Lords movie, we're back at it again with another film of hers. She was much better here, and though one could say she's had nine years to hone her craft, I think this material suited her much better. She's good at being tongue-in-cheek the way Sabato Jr. was, and the two worked great together. Also, she looked amazing in her princess outfit-- amazing at any age, but especially a woman in her early 40s who's had kids. But she brings other elements to the role, the ability to be assertive and regal while still being pretty in a skimpy outfit. Again, if The Asylum decides to make films out of the other books, I hope they keep Lords as well.

Other than the weirdness of the chicks who had their eyes gouged out, this was a fun ride. So the question is, is that a deal breaker for you? It kinda was for me, or at the very least, made this a two instead of a three star film on the Netflix scale. Hopefully if they make films out of the sequels, they'll alter them enough to ramp up the fun and drown out the macabre.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1531911/

Epicenter (2000)

There is a fair amount of Gary Daniels work out there that I still need to get to, and I'm always looking for an idea of what the next one should be. Usually I take reader suggestions, or I browse through his bio on imdb and take the ones with the best supporting casts. This time I went on the review my friend Mr. Kenner wrote on his own site, Movies in the Attic (the link is to the post, and the review is at the bottom of the page.) Of course, I didn't really read his review carefully, just went on his giving it three stars. My bad.

Epicenter is a Lifetime movie of the week disguised as a PM Entertainment action film, with Gary Daniels playing the part of Tim Matheson, and Traci Lords in the role of Joanna Kerns (imagine her as Maggie Seaver on Growing Pains!). Daniels is a dude who wants to sabotage his tech company in San Francisco, so he steals their program that monitors US fighter pilots, and tries to sell it for $15 million to the Russian mob. Traci Lords is the undercover cop with the estranged daughter who's been keeping tabs on them for a year. Everything blows up, Daniels is arrested, the mob's out the 15 mill with no plans, and Daniels isn't talking to either them or Lords and the FBI. That's when Jeff Fahey, Lords' superior, has Daniels flown out to LA, which works out great for Lords because her estranged daughter is down there too. She can wrap of the case and fix her dysfunctional family all in one fell swoop. That is, until the quake hits...



So where do I start? Maybe the first 45-50 minutes, where all that happens is a chase scene literally borrowed from Speed followed by an excitement by repetition out of control trolley crashing into cars. Awesome! Then you have the quake itself, again, excitement by repetition, followed by all the usual disaster film cliches, only done in a manner so perfunctory it hurt my sensibilities. Oh yeah, and Lords and Daniels are forced to act way more than either is comfortable with, which in turn makes us, the viewer, equally uncomfortable. Then there was just so much extra crap that did nothing to move the story forward, like this scene at the end where Lords' daughter is talking to this boy she has a thing for about why he didn't ask her out before or something. Seriously? We needed that? Just show the girl with the boy, have her say "man, I wish Mom would get here soon", and cut away. I was just like Why? Why! WHY!!!

Mr. Kenner made the point in his review that Epicenter was in the vein of the 70s disaster film. I love me a good old fashioned 70s disaster flick as much as the next guy, but that's not what we had here. Once Lords and Daniels escape their initial predicament, all the earthquake is is a backdrop. In real disaster movies, the disaster is a main character, not a supporting role, or in this case, tangential. The problem was, they made their background story too complicated, which meant it took too long to act out, leaving very little time for earthquake stuff. I'm not sure if it was Daniels' agent or what, but they put too much effort into making him a bad guy that wasn't really a bad guy. Think about how much more fun it would've been if Daniels was a real nefarious baddie, like a vicious drug dealer, and Lords and him have to team up to make it out of a busted up building. Almost like The Defiant Ones, only it's the earthquake that's figuratively shackled them together. Keep the bad acting, bad dialog, etc., and make a real tribute to the 70s disaster flick, instead of a Lifetime movie disguised as a disaster flick, with the disaster only playing a supporting role.



As far as Daniels goes, I'm not angry that he didn't use any martial arts, because this was (supposed to be) a disaster film. On the other hand, he did a few things, like jumping and shifting his hands that are cuffed behind his back to in front of him, which indicated that he was more than just a computer genius, and which they never explained. As far as his acting goes, he actually was pretty good when he was the bad guy at the beginning. It was later, when the role became convoluted, that his acting broke down, and I'm not sure we can blame that on him. Again, had he been able to play a straight up baddie who had to put his baddie-ness aside to survive a devastating earthquake, it would've been much better.

It was once said of Audrey Hepburn that one could make a movie of just her eating an apple, and it would be worth watching. I think the same could be said of Traci Lords, only in her case, she can't act as well as Hepburn. She's hot as hell in everything she does naturally, it's when she has to act that it doesn't always work, at least in Epicenter. The scene where I took the image of her smoking is a perfect example. She was hot as hell every time she took a drag, but in between when she argued with her superior about FBI stuff, it came off silly. I went deep into the archives for a film called Frostbite that she was in. I kind of remembered her being good in it, but unfortunately, my review doesn't say really one way or the other, just that the film cracked jokes about her former career in Gentlemen's Cinema. I guess what I'm saying is that she was probably as much a victim of this poor film as Daniels was.



imdb says the film was shot in Vancouver and Romania, but that is also took shots from Speed, Money Train, Metro, and a 1990 TV movie called The Big One: The Great Los Angeles Earthquake. I only bring this up because that shot above looks like the hotel I stayed in when I was in LA last May. Of course, since it would've had to have been stock footage taken potentially as far back as 20 years ago, it's hard to say if it's actually LA or not. It doesn't look like Romania, so if it's not LA, then it would have to be Vancouver, but it really looks like LA, and where I stayed to boot. Also, on the image page, there's a shot of the Super Shuttle, which I took to get from the airport to the hotel in back when I was in LA. Anyone else ever taken one of those?

This is a definite skip. Not because Daniels doesn't use any martial arts, but because it's totally lame-o. If you're in the mood for a good old school disaster flick, check out the Sci Fi (SyFy?) channel schedule and roll the dice. You'll have better luck. And speaking of rolling the dice, I need figure out what my next Gary Daniels flick will be.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0233656/

Frostbite (2005)

This film popped up on ON Demand when my buddy and I were looking for a good comedy after 1 o'clock in the morning. Based on it's runtime (under 90 minutes), we figured we'd give it a try. Also, we're big Ski School fans, so there was a history there.

Frostbite is about this dude and the girl who has a crush on him who go to this snowboarding school he was admitted into. Once there, he finds out it's run like a military academy, and is expelled for not being conservative enough. He meets the ragtag group of kids that hang out at Traci Lords' coffee shop, and with the inspiration of the guy that played Kramer's lawyer on Seinfeld, they win back the mountain from the Evil snowboarding school.

This film was pretty much dick and fart jokes and Three Stooges style humor. But it was done really well. The main character had a pretty solid delivery style that worked in all the funny scenes. I'd say this was almost a parody of another comedy Out Cold, but an homage to the classic Ski School. That's just kind of the way the jokes fell.

There's a blind real estate agent in the film, and they spare no expense in working in crude jokes regarding his impairment. My favorite was when the main character left Traci Lords' coffee shop, tasted his coffee, didn't like, and dumped it aside, splashing the blind man in the face with hot coffee. It sounds horrible, but it was oh so funny.

As in many films of this genre, boobs were everywhere. There was no shame in how often they showed them. Maybe it's a guy thing, but I'm okay with that. Traci Lords' boobs, however, even though they're mentioned a lot, are not shown. There are a few cracks made in reference to her past work in Gentlemen's Cinema, which is interesting, because the majority of people born after like '83 wouldn't get those jokes. I was kinda under the impression the 18-34 demographic was their target, so that cuts out a chunk of it. Maybe it was a little something special for us oldies.

The final race scene was a little lacking. I think they were mocking final race scenes in similar movies, especially with the baddies sporting spiked bats and whatnot without attempting to conceal them. As opposed to other parts of the film, I'm not so sure I'm okay with that. The final race is the parody. You can't parody the parody. Just the same, there was a cute twist with the blind guy and our hero that was kind of cool.

The Kramer's lawyer element finished the film off for me. He was perfect, spitting out conspiracy theories and general observations with the same style of delivery he used on Seinfeld. In one he said Kurt Kobain killed Courtney Love, then cut off his dick, got fake boobs, and now lives as her. In another he says he taught Jim Morrison how to snowboard in 1989. More movies should have him in them. Not him, per se, but his character as Kramer's lawyer.

I'd go with this bad boy if you're pouring through the ON Demand free movie lineup after 1am looking for a comedy like we were. You could rent it if you're in the mood for the same deal, but I'm not sure many movie stores are open that late. Don't buy it. It's not exactly good enough for that kind of commitment.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0431074/