Paydirt (2020)

Back in February I had Francis Rizzo III from KilmerKast on to discuss this film, as it was the place where our two podcast worlds intersect: Val Kilmer and DTV movies. Also it was free on Tubi, so easy for both of us to get at. In addition to us, our friend Todd Gaines at Bulletproof action has covered this.

Paydirt has DTV mainstay Luke Goss as the head of a gang of people who stole a bunch of money from a Mexican cartel and hid it away from them. To throw them off the scent, Goss goes down for a petty drug trafficking charge and gets 5 years in the can--put there by Val Kilmer, who ends up leaving his job on the force in disgrace when the bust only turns up the small amount of weed and Goss's arrest. Now Goss is out and the cartel wants their money, Kilmer wants his revenge, and Goss wants to get the gang back together to get the money too. As all these moving parts come together, will Goss and his crew prevail, or will the cartel take them down, or will Kilmer get his revenge? With all of these movies there's a twist, and this one may involve... an Oscar winner?

If you want to watch this without spoilers, don't read any further, because I can't discuss this without giving away what happens. Essentially, the movie tells us that the idea of the MacGuffin--in this case the bag of money Goss buried--is a fun plot device, but not realistic, so instead they never hid the money, they laundered it in a casino run by a character named Leo Cap, played by Oscar winner Nick Vallelonga. What that means is, all the trouble they went through to break into places to get information on the whereabouts of the money, and drawing out the cartels, and stringing Val Kilmer along, was all useless. What that means is, the movie should have ended in the first five minutes when Luke Goss got out of jail, because he had no reason to not just get on a plane with his gang and flee the country. What that means is the jokes on you movie makers, because you think you're so smart pooh poohing the MacGuffin, when in fact you have no movie without it. I feel like this has to be a first at the DTVC: a movie that obviates itself at the end; the only problem is, though it obviates itself, the 90 minutes I lost in watching it can't be brought back. I guess I got a podcast episode and a blog post out of it, so that's something.

Val Kilmer isn't in this much, and there's a sense that the cancer he was dealing with was preventing him from fully being there in the scenes he was in; but we also had a couple scenes with him and his daughter, which were really nice. If anything, the film giving us those nice moments, and allowing Kilmer to have those moments with his daughter, might make the plot twist that obviates the need to have the movie in the first place worth it. Right now Kilmer is kind of blowing up as part of the new Top Gun movie--which as of this writing I haven't seen--and I think seeing him in something like Paydirt makes me want a win like that for him more. I don't want to say he's been largely forgotten, but he's one of the greatest actors of his generation, and while it's fun to see him in DTV stuff--and cool to see him have an opportunity to act opposite his daughter--big screen success is what he's due for his level of talent.

Luke Goss on the other hand exists more in the DTV realm, but here with his native English accent, he's much better. The character he's playing has the potential to go full bro-y, but the English accent pulls us back from the brink and makes him endearing, which we desperately needed. This is his 11th film on the DTVC, but I think other than Tekken this is the only one where he speaks with his English accent. In a way it's a funny coincidence that I say his American accent makes him sound "bro-y," because he was in a band with his brother called Bros. Anyway, the question is, how high can his tag count get here at the DTVC, considering how many films he's done? The problem is, I generally don't do a Goss film unless someone else who's bigger is in it too. Kilmer, Michael Jai White, Gary Daniels have all featured in Goss films. One I may check out is Hollow Point, which was directed by Daniel Zirilli, who's someone whose work I like to support.

The heist movie has become easy money in the DTV world of the last 20 years or so. Get a group together, throw in a baddie to manage and a police officer to evade, give us quirky characters, and let them have at it. In a way, this film demonstrates the desperation in the attempts by people making these to try something, anything, to make them less run of the mill. I mean, they did have an interracial lesbian couple, so that's not so run of the mill; but the story is something we've seen so many times, guy who knows where the money is finally gets out of jail and all the players start scrambling to get their hands on it. In that sense, the plot twist that obviates the whole thing, shows us how mundane the whole thing has become, the problem is, this was no meta criticism on the genre, it was almost one that wrote itself into a corner and got stuck with the plot twist it went with. The question is, is this any worse than how one-note Hollywood has gotten? If they're not making reboots or sequels, they're making origin stories with one-name titles. Film in America has gotten safer everywhere, and this is the result. 

Finally, we had another Oscar winner in a DTVC film, and I had no idea until Francis let me know when we were doing the podcast. Nick Vallelonga won two Oscars for Green Book, and yet had this small part as a casino owner in this DTV film. I was trying to think how many Oscar winners we've had on here now. De Niro, Stallone, and Cage first come to mind. We also had Jack Palance and Angelina Jolie in Cyborg III. Ernest Borgnine's been on a couple times as well; plus we did an old Humphrey Bogart film--that wasn't exactly DTV. And then with The Irishman, in addition to De Niro we had Scorsese, Pacino, and Pesce. Out of all the Oscar winners we've had on the site though, the most tagged is Cuba Gooding Jr. with 11.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi. I think it's only for Kilmer completists, because it has that added element of him acting with his daughter. Beyond that, the movie is telling you not to bother--movies about MacGuffins are childish fantasy, right? One you should bother with though is KilmerKast, which is a really fun podcast Francis does that covers the career of Val Kilmer.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11176322

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

Felon (2008)

Last year I was a guest on Francis Rizzo III's KilmerKast podcast, and we discussed this film. I've been meaning to review it here since then, but something else seemed to always bump it down the list, so once we got through my February and March posts, I made a point of getting this up first thing in April, and here we are. In addition to us, Cool Target Action Reviews has covered this, so you can go there to see what they thought.

Felon has Stephen Dorff as a guy with a wife, a young child, and a contracting business that's doing well. All that changes one night when an intruder breaks into their house, and after he chases the guy outside, he strikes him in the head with a baseball bat, killing him. The cops decide this isn't a simple case of self-defense, so he ends up in the system, where, to save money he takes a plea that only gives him three years in prison. That doesn't work out so well either, because on the way to the prison a guy is shanked, and the weapon is stashed under Dorff's seat. Afraid to rat the killer out, he gets put in the maximum security unit, where the head guard is pitting prisoners against each other in brutal brawls. Will Dorff make it out of the system alive?

Brutal is one way to describe this. Visceral is another, especially with the fights. These aren't nicely choreographed affairs like we saw in Avengement--though those were brutal too--instead we had two people whaling on each other. The realistic view of jail and prison that this movie gives us isn't fun at all, which makes this a bit of a tough watch. The problem for me came in when we had some holes in the plot. That's the thing, I can do not fun if the story's compelling and believable. The first thing is Dorff foregoes an attorney for a public defender to save money. Later we find out that they had money available that they could have used for his defense. Why didn't he do that? Any decent lawyer--which for the money he was talking about having, he could've afforded--could have pled this thing down to probation. Once we find out about this money, it's like, why are we here watching him go through all this? Second, the end of the movie requires a lot of Hail Marys for it to work. When the protagonists need a lot of luck for it to all go right, it's harder to buy in, and again, this movie needed that buy-in. Also, not necessarily a bad thing, but the film touches on some things, like the prison-industrial complex, where the number one money maker in the town is the prison, but it was beyond the scope of their 104-minute runtime to really get into it. Just the same, the stark, realistic view of our jail and prison system was very necessary and very well done, and to me that's really where this movie makes its money.

Val Kilmer was the reason why we were talking about this at all, and I've realized I didn't mention him in the first three paragraphs. He's interesting here as the mercurial prisoner in for life after he avenged his wife and daughter's deaths by killing the men responsible and their families. He ends up in the same cell as Dorff after he starts a riot in his previous prison. He's a bit of the wise lifer who shows Dorff the ropes, but what I liked was the film depicted him having to go through the same humiliating rituals of prison as everyone else. Often these movies have a character like him, and the guards and fellow inmates pay him deference so he doesn't have to deal with things like strip searches or having his hands cuffed behind him before he leaves his cell. I think in that sense, Kilmer leans into this role and fills exactly what the filmmakers were looking for, which I really appreciated. The goatee he sported, maybe notsomuch.

This is our fifth Stephen Dorff film on the DTVC, the last being in 2011 when we posted Shadowboxer. The thing about him here, is he had a bit of the shine of child actor on him, and despite the work he did to immerse himself in this part, I kept seeing the cool 2000s star who always got into trouble. I always that early e-cigs commercial he did, where he's standing on the beach in his James Dean pea coat with collar up, face perfectly stubbled and hair perfectly coiffed, smoking his e-cig in the best movie star leading man style, while we hear his voice-over telling us "hey, we're all adults here." And maybe that's my issue and not Dorff's. The character too had some issues though. One, we have no idea how he knows how to fight, yet he has no problem defending himself in prison. Two, perhaps if we did, we'd also understand why he, after chasing he intruder from his home, followed him out, leading to hitting him in the head with the bat. I get wanting to protect your family, but for most people getting the guy out is enough, so it would've been good to know why Dorff's character took it further than that. Again, we needed these things in place to follow this movie into the darker, bleaker story it wanted to tell.

Dorff's wife was played by Marisol Nichols, who I knew from her role as Audrey in Vegas Vacation. Obviously this film wasn't as fun as that one, though this could have benefited from a Wayne Newton cameo to lighten things up. In one scene, when she comes to visit Dorff in prison, she needs to take off her clothes for a strip search, and according to IMDb it's the only nude scene of her career. Francis and I agreed that it wasn't really necessary (I know, me the guy who grew up on raunchy romp comedies saying a nude scene isn't necessary!), and in fact actually took away from the impact of the scene that they were going for. Had they gone shoulders up--even if she still needed to be nude for the scene for her to get into character--and focused on her face and the indignity of what she was going through, it would've been more powerful and really hit home. Her character was another example too of how the limited scope of the film caused them to touch on things they couldn't really delve into more. You could almost have made a separate film about what it was like for her on the outside dealing with everything that comes with having her husband in prison.

Some of the events in this film were based on the notorious Corcoran State Prison in California, so I decided to look it up, and it turns out this film may have gone easy on the brutality. Yes, the staged fights that the film depicts happened, but in the film, the shooting of the fighters seemed extreme--like the main guard, played by Harold Perrineau, had gone off the rails. Turns out, those shootings of the inmates were more common than that. Also, among the more famous inmates, one was Joe Son, who I had no idea when I reviewed Shootfighter 2 last October was convicted of torture in 2011 (not rape because the statute of limitations had passed on that, which makes no sense that there's a statute of limitations on rape, but that's our justice system for you), and then got more time after he killed his cellmate. Beyond the fact that this prison seems like a cesspool of corruption and maltreatment of the prisoners, in reading the lists of inmates, these seem to be the worst of the worst, which makes it seem even stranger that someone like Dorff's character would've been sent there--by the same token, it adds enough plausible deniability in case anyone asked about whether certain details actually happened the way they told it.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can stream this on Netflix--but whenever you end up reading this you never know if they'll have dumped it by then. This is not a fun movie by any stretch, but while it has some holes in it, overall it has a solid commentary on the US justice system that may be worth your watch. Also, you can catch KilmerKast on iTunes, or by going to this link here: https://anchor.fm/francis-rizzo-iii1 In addition to talking Kilmer, Francis does a great job with segments like Kilmer in Kontext, where he looks at the movies, music, and TV shows that were popular when the film came out; and then games with his guests, like on this one where I had to guess whether the Kilmer film he mentioned had Kilmer as a cop or a criminal.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1117385

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

 

Double Identity (2009)

A little while back I was a guest on KilmerKast with Francis Rizzo III to discuss this movie. If you're not familiar with it, KilmerKast is a podcast dedicated to looking at the films of the great Val Kilmer, but also has some other really fun segments, like looking back on the films, TV, and music that were popular when the film in question came out, and then games with the guest, like the one I did where Francis translated Kilmer titles into Swedish, and then had me guess if what he was saying was a Kilmer film title, or an IKEA item. It was a lot of fun, and a podcast everyone should check out if they haven't already.

Double Identity has Val Kilmer as a doctor in Bulgaria doing charity work who is mistaken for a British secret agent that's trying to keep an Eastern European crime boss from selling diamonds on the black market--or something like that. As most Hitchcockian thrillers are wont to do, we have a mysterious beautiful woman in Izabella Miko who is either there to help, or there to get poor Kilmer in deeper. Will our hapless hero be a little less hapless and extricate himself out of this dangerous circumstance?

 

This movie looks, feels, and smells like your standard 2000s era Eastern European shot DTV flick with a once big star in the lead. The reality is it could have been anyone playing this part, Kilmer, Christian Slater, Cuba Gooding Jr., etc., but the fact that it's Kilmer added a level of Kilmer-ness to it that makes it a bit more fun in my opinion. That being said, there isn't anything all that remarkable about this that makes it any more than just the standard 2000s era Eastern European shot DTV flick with a once big star in the lead. There were a few one-off scenes that felt really inspired, which is something you don't usually get from a film of this ilk, but there were just as many scenes where you're like "that felt a bit convenient/lazy/absurd." I'm not a fan of the expression "it is what it is," but this movie was what it was, either for good or for bad.

We're now at 10 Kilmer films on the site, which puts him one ahead of Christian Slater, and one behind Cuba Gooding Jr., two former big screen stars that I think are the best Kilmer comps. If you look at his IMDb bio, he did a bunch in this late 2000s/early 2010s period, and then moved on to more smaller parts in big screen films, TV roles, and indie projects. The thing is, most of them are like this one, with only a few things here or there to distinguish it from the others. I think that's why I've kind of left his stuff alone for so long--this is our first Kilmer film since we did 7 Below in October of 2013. That doesn't mean I'm not a huge fan of Kilmer's, I am, and I think seeing him here in the film was one of the bright spots; but with so many movies out there to review, "bright spots" aren't enough to push more of these above some of the newer stuff out there, or the tons of 80s and 90s stuff we still haven't reviewed yet.

 

When I was on KilmerKast, one of the things we talked about was how many of these DTV films were made at this time that had the same look and feel. Whether it was Sofia, Bulgaria, or Bucharest, Romania, whether it was a low-budget actioner film or a suspense yarn like this was, there was this mass-produced feel to it, kind of like the modern-day Brill Building approach to pop music where it all sounds the same. It had a cynicism to it that this film felt like it was dripping with, even when there were some truly inspired scenes or plot devices that I really liked. Shoot it in 10 days, slap a big name on the cover, add in a pretty Eastern European co-star, and get it on the video store shelves, which at that time were also mostly big chains that were looking for DVDs for people who missed out on renting one of the 30 copies of the new Transformers movie they had. That ecosystem also helped birth The Asylum, and now that all the video stores are shuttered and people are actually remembering Blockbuster with rose-tinted glasses, the Asylum is still marching on, but to some extent these Eastern European shot movies have been replaced, post-2008 financial crisis, by even quicker and cheaper shot films in places like Michigan or Louisiana. The thing has gone even more cynical in ten years, which makes me wonder what it'll look like in 2031.

Izabella Miko plays the pretty Eastern European co-star, which does sound a bit dismissive, since she's had a bigger career here in the States, but I think that gets back to the cynicism I talked about above. It's not that she's just any pretty Eastern European actress, but the film makes it feel that way. The same way that any number of stars could have played Kilmer's part, the fact that Miko brings a better acting pedigree to the proceedings isn't a value-add with the assembly-line vibe of the movie. I don't know if this were made on a bigger budget with a longer shooting schedule if the same pairing of Kilmer and Miko could have given us the kind of TNT New Classic suspense actioner that made a lot of money in the box office in the late 90s/early 2000s though either. Honestly I don't know how good any of those were, including something like The Saint that Kilmer was in, but they worked for a certain audience, and I guess that brings us back to the cynicism: make this on the cheap and hope to tap into that audience on a smaller scale.

 

Finally, this film is supposed to take place in 1992, which next year will be 30 years ago. I've noticed this trend online of people freaking out about how long ago the 90s are, and making comparisons with how long ago the 90s were from the 60s or 70s. Like "This year we'll be as far from when The Phantom Menace came out as The Phantom Menace was from when the original Star Wars came out." It's as if people our age were the first people to ever be old. Or is it a social media phenomenon. I mean, would someone born in the 1890s have posted in the 1940s "we're as far from 1900 as 1900 was from the start of the Civil War"? Or maybe someone my grandfather's age, being like "we're as far now from WWII as WWII was from the Civil War." And then all the comments, "Dude," "mind blown," "I'm going to go have a good cry"... okay, I made that last one up, but I like it better than "literally crying".

And with that, let's wrap this one up. You can stream this on Tubi as of this writing, and I think that's the best bet. For my money, it's really only for Kilmer completists, otherwise it's unfortunately too unremarkable. Speaking of Kilmer completists, remember to check out KilmerKast, it's a really fun time, and thank you again to Francis for having me on!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1290400

And if you haven't yet, check out my novel, Chad in Accounting, in paperback or on Kindle!

7 Below aka Seven Below (2012)

I saw this was on Instant, and it had Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames in it.  That's it, oh, and it was 90 minutes long.  That helps too.  As an aside, did you know that Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames were born about seven months apart?  Both in 1959, Rhames on May 12, Kilmer on December 31.  imdb is a wonderful time waster, isn't it?

7 Below is about a house in which the family's adopted son kills them all in the early 1900s.  When a group of people in the present time, including Val Kilm and Luke Goss, take a bus trip into the Minnesota wilderness, and the bus crashes, local man Ving Rhames takes them back to his place to wait out a storm.  That place is, you guessed it, the house where the kid offed his family.



I know Val, it hurts.  I don't know what we're doing here.  Too much nothing happening.  Too much almost happening but not happening.  So many loose ends flying together near the end that I needed a pair of safety goggles.  Maybe most egregious: our heroes do nothing to figure out their own plight or how they can fix it.  They stumble around aimlessly in the dark, though we're supposed to believe they know what they're doing, but they never get close to what's happening to them, and need it revealed in the last 10 minutes.  That's lazy in my book.  There was an attempt to affect a Stephen King style secluded location creepiness, but the characters don't buy in, which means we lose it; and the Vincent Price haunted mansion style film falls flat too when, despite Rhames's best efforts, his Price-like character is written too flatly to keep us intrigued.  By the time we see a ghost in a sheet attack the hero (I'm not kidding, it was almost bad Halloween costume ghost in the sheet), I was done.  This is a pass for me.

Val honey, I know, what is your agent doing?  How did you end up in this?  Yes, if you close your eyes enough maybe it'll all be a dream and you'll be back playing Jim Morrison.  His role in this isn't as big as you'd like, and while I'm giving some of the plot away, I think it's better to warn you going in that, while he's good, he barely makes it through the first third of the film.  A surprising development?  A plot twist keeping us on our toes?  Or a Kilmer bait-and-switch?  You decide.  (Oh, and I will not make any jokes about how former Batman Kilmer looks primed to play the Penguin in the next film.)  (Didn't you just say you weren't going to make that joke?)



I don't know if this movie was trying to be original or hit us with an original concept, but it was pretty paint-by-numbers, right down to the classic White Man Will Save You trope.  Latina?  White Man will save you.  What reason do you have not to trust me?  There is not 500 years of history telling you you're making a mistake, this is a movie, and White Man is good, very good.  Yes, statistically speaking, if a woman is stranded on the side of the road with car trouble and a straight White Man pulls over to help her, things are more likely to end badly for her than good for her-- but not in Movieworld, where White Man is good and he will hug you and love and protect you from Bad Men.  Save us White Man!

Ving Rhames does his best to pull what he can from his character.  He tries to make it a cross between his own aesthetic and that old Vincent Price haunted mansion character, but there isn't much there for him to work with.  Man it was fun watching him try though.  Maybe that's why he took this role, for the challenge of pulling that off.  If you really want to think outside the box though, have the blond-haired blue-eyed hero play the Vincent Price character, and Ving Rhames be the guy that picks up the hot Latina who's having car trouble.  Now that's a plot twist for an American movie.



Among the other stars, we had Matt Barr as our hero, Bonnie Somerville as Kilmer's wife, and Rebecca Da Costa as the woman Barr picks up by the side of the road.  They all do the roles you expect them to, though Somerville as Kilmer's wife was fun when she and Kilmer were arguing early on, and it was too bad she couldn't play off him more.  Then there was Luke Goss and Barr's brother.  We've seen him in a fair amount of DTV roles, and he seems to have carved out this niche for himself playing the early-thirtysomething all-American jackass.  He has it all down, the mannerisms, the speech (though his accent does peek out from time to time) the boot-cut designer jeans with rips in all the right places, the gaudy belt buckle, the knit cap, and the four-button muscle-fit henley.  The thing is, in real life he's a fortysomething man from London.  I guess if his twin brother Matty can carve out a niche playing gigs at Caesar's Palace in Vegas, Luke can carve out a niche as the all-American jackass, and I think he being removed from it like he is, he can bring a sense of self-awareness to his rendition of the character that a real all-American jackass wouldn't have.  In that sense, Goss may have been the most consistent character, in that like the others it was so one-dimensional, but he's going for that and nailed it.

Obviously this is a pass for me.  My girlfriend told me that when she looked it up on Netflix after I told her I was reviewing it, that one of the reviewers on there asked for the ol' temporal refund-- you know, "I want my 90 minutes back."  I never demand the temporal refund, because good or bad I get a review out of it, but you might, so I'd avoid it, because we all know no one has ever been made whole on that temporal refund in the history of movies.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1988781/

Gun (2010)

This one's been on my radar for some time. Why did I finally decide to watch it? Maybe the 82 minute running time. Or the Netflix Watch Instantly availability. Whatever it was, we're here now, so let's see how it went.

Gun follows Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson as he attempts to take over the illegal gun trade in Detroit. In the process of killing of a rival, about six innocent bystanders are caught in the crossfire, and DPD detectives James Remar and Paul Calderon are under intense pressure to bring him in. Enter Val Kilmer, an old buddy of 50's, just out of the clink, and looking for something to do. 50 takes him in and makes him his right-hand man as he looks to make the deal that brings him him up to the next level from small time hustler to shot-caller. Will some missteps in his past come back to haunt him though?



I really liked this. It seems like these Detroit/New Orleans DTV flicks are either hit or miss, but when they hit, they're really good. 50 is solid, and I think the fact that he wrote this allowed him to write a character for himself that was right in his wheelhouse. When you throw in great performances from Remar, Calderon, and Kilmer; plus great cameos from Danny Trejo and John Larroquette, you've got yourself something that's well beyond its DTV paygrade. Well worth checking out.

For many readers, I'm sure the idea of me and 50 Cent sounds like an invitation for me to let rip, but he's been pretty solid in the few films we've seen of him. This one might be his best. It blends the best parts of a sinister baddie, with his own trademark wit that we haven't seen as much of in his previous efforts. Plus you have the double threat that he also wrote this, which I can't imagine any of us saw working out. 50 Cent brought it here, and he deserves all the credit for that.



I liked Kilmer as well. He and 50 Cent were great together in Streets of Blood too, which was also great. Why they work well together is beyond me, but hopefully they'll have more team-ups. I must confess, I've done a poor job keeping up with Kilmer's recent DTV oeuvre, which doesn't speak well of a Direct to Video Connoisseur, so I'll have to either get on that or change the blog title to Direct to Video Dude. As far as this one goes, there's something very Michael Madsen in Kilmer's performance, yet it's also still very Kilmer. I could spend this paragraph talking about the weight he's put on, but when he gives a solid performance like the one in Gun, he needs to be applauded.

As far as all the rest, I thought James Remar hit it out of the park. Who knows how many things I've seen him in in my life, but what separates the good and the bad for me is the fit and the scope of the character he's given. Give him something that works for him, and give him something more than just a two-scene afterthought, and you get the high quality performance we saw here. Not to be outdone, Paul Calderon was great as his partner too. Not quite the part Remar had, but it worked. Then there's Danny Trejo, who has one scene as a Chicago crime boss. I don't know that he could've had a bigger part, but it was a coup that they were able to get him to play one as small as this one. Always great to see him though. And finally, John Larroquette. How did that happen? There's something very Bill Maher-ish about his small role as a Detroit mafioso. Maybe it's the hair. Still, great to finally do a film with him in it.



Before I get into this paragraph, I want to reiterate that I enjoyed Gun, and I don't want what I'm about to say to detract from that. The thing is, as much as I dig these DTV crime dramas shot in Grand Rapids or Detroit, I'm still waiting for a new Detroitsploitation. I'm waiting for someone to come in and give us a new Cannon or PM Entertainment-- or hell, AIP-- with action flicks shot in Detroit. I'm talking, big, schlocky, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink bad actioners. I'm talking Don "The Dragon" Wilson framed for a crime he didn't commit taking on the world as he tries to clear his name one roundhouse and jumpkick of a stuntman through a glass coffee table at a time. I want Gary Daniels driving a dirt bike away from an abandoned warehouse right before it explodes. Why are these films not being made? Yes, I enjoyed Gun, but for every Gun, there're like five of these things that don't work and were never going to work. You know what works? Cannon works. PM Entertainment works. Blowing shit up works. Jumping dirt bikes over '84 LTDs works. Roundhouse kicking stuntmen through sliding glass doors works. There's a void in the market where the old 80s/90s B-actioner used to be, and Detroit is the place to bring it back.

Soapbox done. Gun is plenty worth checking out. 82 minutes, Netflix Watch Instantly, great cast, fun story, it's all there for you. As I said above, these movies are always hit or miss, but this is definitely a hit.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1560954/

Blood Out (2011)

I don't know what happened with this one. I had it on my radar, then totally forgot about it, then our buddy from down under, Simon at Explosive Action, reviewed it, but that was like a full three months ago. It's funny how a movie can get lost in the shuffle like that. Let's see if it was worth the wait.

Blood Out is your classic Hellcats Stone Cold style scenario, with Luke Goss's brother killed by a drug cartel, and Goss goes out and gets him a couple sleeves of tats and infiltrates them to get his revenge. 50 Cent, Vinnie Jones, and Val Kilmer also appear.



This was a not-so-much for me. The action was pretty solid, and until the end fight with some odd looking gladiator guy, looked good and wasn't overly MTV edited. The big thing that got me was how bad the dialog was, and how much of it we had to slog through. One scene with Goss and Tamer Hassan was mindnumbingly atrocious, and the whole time I'm expecting a payoff, like maybe Hassan finds out what Goss is up to. Nope, it was just a "we think we write quality dialog and we're going to inundate you with it until IQ drops ten points." Come on man. The other thing was Goss as the hero. It wasn't just that I'm trying to believe a former boy bander can rock a sleeve of tats and a cigarette without any irony, but earlier on we're treated to a scene where, dressed in his Mayberry sheriff's deputy outfit, gets his ass kicked and tased by 50 Cent, then is handcuffed to a men's room sink. You can't cut that many cool points off your hero and expect him to recover-- especially not when he's already starting behind the 8-ball.

This is bait-and-switch city. 50 Cent: 1 and 1/2 scenes. Vinnie Jones: one scene at the beginning, a little more screen time near the very end. Val Kilmer: half scene near the middle, then shares a bunch of screen time with Jones, also at the very end. Instead we're treated to a guy from a national vodka commercial, sold to us as equally hardcore as Goss, and a bunch of extras from the sets of P.O.D. videos. Now, there are two variants of the cover-- or maybe one is a poster and the other is the cover-- and I included the version (the one I think is just a poster) that features Goss, and as such is more honest and less shady to us the consumer; and then there's the one that you see here, which is what most American renters will see, which has 50 cent, Kilmer, and Vinnie Jones out in front, and Goss buried in the back. I mean, how am I supposed to take Luke Goss seriously as the lead if the people distributing the movie can't even do it?



To be fair to Goss, when rocking the sleeve of tats and smoking, he wasn't so bad as the hero. I don't know, the whole squinting like he smells something funny all the time, the designer jeans and Abercrombie Gay Chic form fitting three-button henleys, the fashionable five-o'clock shadow and shaved head, it's all very "Dude in Vegas with his buddies checking out the UFC PPV." And again, if the people making the movie don't think he's worthy of selling it to us, why should we? So he starts the movie with that many strikes against him, and then the film has him weakly standby as 50 Cent beats him up, tases him, and then handcuffs him to a bathroom sink, all while he's wearing a cute little sheriff's deputy outfit-- also formfitting, like he's a stripper heading to a bachelorette party. What this movie needs-- and all other Luke Goss films for that matter-- is to infuse some of that natural English charisma that us Americans love. A thick cockney accent, lots of smoking and lots of tats (which this movie got right), and then crank up the soccer hooligan-ness to ten. I don't want an American jackass as my hero, so why try to make Luke Goss into one?

When last we saw 50 cent and Val Kilmer, they were in the excellent Streets of Blood. This is obviously nothing like that. No gritty crime drama, just re-tread of well worn territory, and lacking heavily on the Kilmer and the 50 Cent. But what Streets of Blood shows is that it is capable to make good DTV; and even when we're working on well worn territory like this was, it's still possible to make it good-- the action in this is testament to that. But again, I can't help going back to this: how seriously can you expect us to take your movie, if you're featuring on your cover two actors that have a combined 10 minutes of screen time? You can't think it's very good yourself, otherwise you wouldn't stoop so low to trick us.



I want to go back to Val Kilmer, because I really liked him as the bad guy here, even if he's barely in the film at all. He needed to be the head baddie and the focal point of the film, and Goss needed to be trying to take him down. Those bad dialog scenes would've been much better with Kilmer making the best of them, and a lot of the other weirdness of the film, like the grafted in S&M stuff, would've been handled much better by him too. Here's the thing, if you're going to have a person of Kilmer's talent in the film, you gotta use him, otherwise his scant screen time will be enough to make the actors you're giving bigger parts to look amateurish by comparison.

This had the action down-- for the most part-- but there wasn't enough, and the bait-and-switches combined with a lack of faith in Luke Goss and/or a script that emasculated him early on spelled a recipe for movie sautéed in wrong sauce. Too bad, because it looked like they had the raw materials to make something fun, just not the quality of execution.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1477675/

Hard Cash aka Run for the Money (2002)

This is one of those ones that, despite how many bad things I've heard about it, the star power was too big to ignore it. It's one of those things I think people don't understand about my review site: I have to do them whether they're good or bad, and filling my comment boxes for other movies with things you'd rather do than watch this doesn't make it any easier on me, it just means I have to look forward to those same negative comments again when I write the actual review. Speaking of which, our friend at Cool Target Action Reviews has looked at Hard Cash as well.

Hard Cash follows highly sophisticated thief Christian Slater, who is caught trying to steal a bunch of cash from William Forsythe and spends a year in jail. Once out, he plans a huge OTB heist with a gang that includes Daryl Hannah, Balthazar Getty, and Bokeem Woodbine. Problem: that was earmarked fed cash, and fed Val Kilmer sees an opportunity to make some more by kidnapping Slater's daughter and forcing him and his gang to hit an armored truck.



I don't know if this deserves the "good luck with that one" or "I wanted to scratch my eyes out" warnings I received in the comments of previous Val Kilmer and Christian Slater movie reviews I've done, but it wasn't good either. It suffered from an identity crisis, starting out off beat and darkly comedic, then becoming too serious, and from there never knowing what it wanted. Then the plot ran out of control, as the writers didn't know how to put the right bow on things and wrap it up. Plot twists all over the place, making us wonder what a character's motivations were, especially Slater's girlfriend. It's almost as if two people wrote two different stories, and someone tried to put them together.

I guess we'll start with Slater because he had the biggest part. Great as always, and he did a solid job of rolling with the punches of a poorly written character with no solid identity. If I were to point to the area where the film went off the rails with him, I'd say it was inserting the daughter. Kids are always complicated, and when she showed up the humor that carried the opening disappeared. I would've liked to have seen Slater and Kilmer have a true face off where their comedic talents and action movie past came together, but with a kid's life in peril, it's kind of hard to do either.



Kilmer's could've been an even better character than Slater's, and I know Kilmer has the chops to pull that off, but he was even more wasted after the introduction of the kid. He went from funny and borderline crazy to run-of-the-mill baddie at that point, which left me wondering: why are we even here? Once Kilmer becomes run-of-the-mill, I'm mentally checking out and thinking about Bennett in Commando-- now he was a great run-of-the-mill baddie!

The heist film is never easy, but here it felt like the people involved with making it were good with just casting some big names, and hoping the rest will take care of itself. Either that, or they reached a point where they were just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what will stick. We had love triangles that we could've done without, characters killed off or killing each other off with the only real purpose being to thin out the cast. I'm not saying we need a remake of the original Ocean's Eleven, but that would've been a great place to start.



More than anything, while this lost its identity midway through, it was also fairly unremarkable throughout. Again, it's great that you've gathered up this talent, but what's the point? Is the point to just splash them all over the front and back covers and sell DVDs? If the movie is itself is just a big ol' pile of blah, is that just the high cost of doing business? It's an interesting question: does it matter how good or bad the movie is, as long as I was duped into renting it?

As I mentioned in the opening, I wasn't duped, I had to do this one based on the star power alone, but that doesn't mean I won't use this last paragraph to warn you off from it-- unless you have a review site too and know you'll have to do this one eventually. In that case "man, good luck with that, I'd rather watch Battlefield Earth while drinking prune juice in a sweltering room full of angry killer bees and wearing nothing but wool underwear than watch that sack of asscrack again!"

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0248640/

Kill the Irishman (2011)

I saw an ad for this on TV about five days before it was released on DVD. According to imdb, it had a very limited theatrical release, grossing a little over $1 million, so it's success was predicated on it's DVD rentals and sales. With the cast involved and the story, I was hoping for the best.

Kill the Irishman is based on the true story of Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson), a man who grew up in Cleveland and became a major figure in their mob scene, taking on the Italian mafia and their New York Sicilian connections, and creating a major war of car bombs throughout the city in the mid 70s.



This was an excellent film. One of those gems that we look at here as "their loss is our gain", something that slips through the cracks into the land of DTV, but maybe shouldn't have been there. But I'm surprised, because this story is so compelling, and the fact that the most violent aspects of it are true, would make it seem like it's primed for a big time theatrical ensemble piece like The Departed. I guess Cleveland isn't as Hollywood as Boston, I don't know. Beyond the great story, all of the actors turned in solid performances, from Stevenson; to Christopher Walken, Vincent D'onofrio, and Val Kilmer; down to much smaller parts by Paul Sorvino and Vinnie Jones-- we even had DTVC favorite Robert Davi. One of the better films released this year, DTV or otherwise.

How do you not love Christopher Walken? I started with him because he's always been a good crime boss, and in Kill the Irishman, he plays a Jewish racketeer that runs numbers and whatnot. I couldn't believe that this is only his second tag on here, the other being New Rose Motel. Wow, considering two of the three Prophecy films were DTV. He's also another Oscar winner, which is something we don't see on here often either. In Kill the Irishman, there was no irony in his performance-- he wasn't cast to be Christopher Walken, he was cast to play a part, and he did that really well.



When I was thinking about this as a major Hollywood production, I couldn't think of anyone else playing the part of Danny Greene, Ray Stevenson was it. Big, imposing, larger than life, Stevenson brought it all, and I'm not sure we have another Irish actor in Hollywood that fits that bill like he does. The last time we saw him, it was in Punisher: War Zone, which was good, but not nearly as good as this, and I was glad to see him shine in the lead role.

And while we're at it, what about Val Kilmer? He's been in and out of the DTV world recently, though mostly in, and I must confess, we're really far behind on making those happen; but in Kill the Irishman we got a sense of the new, more mature Val Kilmer, who might not be able to carry a film as an action lead like he did in The Saint, but still has that screen presence that goes a long way. He played the local police chief, having both an adversarial relationship and a grudging respect bordering on friendship with Danny Greene. It was a very cool role, and Kilmer filled it perfectly.



Finally, the DVD comes with an hour-long featurette documentary that outlines the real Danny Greene and the real events that surrounded his life in Cleveland in the 60s and 70s. I liked it, because it put a lot of what we saw in context. It also showed the aftermath of some of the bombings, and it isn't pretty. I think what you have to do is know that the movie is only telling one side of things, and is also playing with some events to make them more cinematic, but still take the movie as a movie on its own. It is kind of crazy though to see how much of it, especially the violent aspects, were real.

This is available on DVD from Netflix, Amazon, Red Box, etc, and it's worth you taking a look at. This is one of those rare occasions where something great slips through the cracks and ends up here. Especially if you're into gangster flicks, this is one of the better ones I've seen in some time.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1416801/

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009)

When I reviewed the Abel Ferrara/Harvey Keitel Bad Lieutenant back in August of 2008, this newer Werner Herzog-directed film starring Nicolas Cage was still in development. I ended up missing it when it played at our local indie theater, but luckily Netflix shipped it out to me the day it was released on DVD. Netflix rules! And just in time for our Wild Card post this week.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans isn't quite the movie the other Bad Lieutenant was. Both had drug addicted police lieutenants that get in over their heads with gambling debts and what not, but that's where the similarities end. In this one, Nicloas Cage plays a cop who injures his back saving a criminal from a flooded holding cell during the aftermath of Katrina. He's promoted to lieutenant for his sacrifice, but is also prescribed a cocktail of pain relievers, which leads him down the primrose path to addiction. As his myriad ways of obtaining drugs start to catch up with him and the net is closing in, he finds an unlikely ally in the crime lord he'd been trying to take down for the slaying of a family of five.

I liked this, I don't know if I'd say a lot, but I liked it. There were scenes and images I liked a lot, but the film as a whole had some issues. The end was kind of odd to me, for one thing. Obviously I can't get into that without giving the film away, so maybe someone else who's seen it can either back me up or tell me I'm crazy. Herzog's direction really worked, and he and Cage had a great actor/director chemistry. I'm not sure I can choose between this one or the Ferrara/Keitel one either, because they're so different. While Ferrara's direction made me think of French New Wave, Herzog's made me think of... well... Herzog. A better script would have made it great.

One thing I can say about this, is it's worth ten National Treasures in artistic merit, but it's not worth a hundredth of a National Treasure in terms of earning potential. I think that's why it's so hard to judge Nicolas Cage based on The Weather Man or Knowing, because those sacks of asscrack pay the bills; and if we're realistic, take a lot less work to accomplish as an actor than Bad Lieutenant: PC-NO. A lot of my friends say to me all the time how they can't stand Cage, and I used to agree, until I revisited Leaving Las Vegas last fall, and was reminded of what made Cage great. His role here will remind you again.

Klaus Kinski is a member of our DTVC Hall of Fame, and though we've left him for a bit to look at other actors, it's important to bring him up if we're talking about Werner Herzog. Are they the best actor/director pairing of all time? I think some much better cases could be made for Kurosawa/Mifune or Scorsese/De Niro, so probably no. Are they the most intriguing pair of all time? I think you could look at the five films they've done together and answer yes. But it wasn't really those films I had in my mind as I watched this, it was another of Herzog's: a documentary called Grizzly Man. It was just this window into how Herzog sees the world, and puts a film like Bad Lieutenant: PC-NO into perspective--this idea that the wild is vicious and deadly, and humans that veer too far in that direction face dire consequences. I was kind of upset, because there are some scenes in the film (again, I won't give them away) that I would've liked to known Herzog's thought process on, but this DVD didn't have any director's commentary--it didn't have any commentary for that matter.

One thing evident in the Kinski/Herzog films though, is that it's Herzog who gets Kinski, not the other way around--I can't imagine Kinski would've cared to get Herzog, or anyone else for that matter. In Bad Lieutenant: PC-NO, something different happens: Cage seems to get what Herzog is about, and he works in that realm. It makes this a very different film from those other five. There wasn't that sense of struggle, and I think Herzog needs that when he works. Again, there was no commentary, but I can't imagine Cage was giving him anywhere near the hard time Kinski always did; and oddly enough, I think that harmony affected the film. Herzog tried to convey conflict on the screen in a variety of ways, but I'm not so sure it's something that can always be manufactured if the feeling off set is too harmonious.

Finally, you'd think with Eva Mendes in the film, it would be her that I'm talking about as the hottest woman in the film, and though she was hot, it was Fairuza Balk in only one scene who stood out. This is one area where a foreign director who lives by his own rules like Herzog can really turn some of our preconceived notions upside-down. The average American director looks to Balk for their goth chick or scary chick. Herzog saw something else, and he went with it, resulting in this scene where Balk's character thinks she's going to have sex with Cage, is seductively crawling over him in bed in her underwear and police boots, only to find out he's too wasted and is only there with her to find out how she can get him drugs from the Louisiana Highway Patrol evidence locker. Without her being as hot as she is in that scene, we have no idea how far gone Cage is, and it all works perfectly.

I think most of my readers would enjoy this. Best way to know: if you hated National Treasure, you'll like Bad Lieutenant: PC-NO. I also think, if you're a big fan of the Ferrara/Keitel version, you should watch this. It's no cheap knock off, this is it's own movie, and it's interesting to compare the two. If I was going to pick, I'd say the earlier one is the more complete film, making it better in my eyes.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1095217/

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Hardwired (2009)

This was released on Tuesday, the same day as Command Performance, and my plan was to review them one after the other (obviously the Dolph film had first priority-- obviously). Problem was, Netflix didn't have enough copies of it, and I was stuck with the dreaded Very Long Wait, which turned into "For Fri: Hardwired" after I returned three films on Wednesday. That Netflix, what are we gonna do with them?

Hardwired takes place "a few years" into the future, where the economy is even worse than it is now, and huge corporations had to bail out the government when it couldn't bail out the huge corporations. If that doesn't make enough sense, Hope Industries has decided that we've saturated all our advertising space, and we need to put a computer chip in our brains that makes us hallucinate pitchmen and women until we buy their product. If people don't like the chip, it explodes, simple as that. 660 people were chosen for inclusion in the test process: 659 loners, and one family man, Cuba Gooding jr., who just happened to piss off one of the people who chose the people to get the chip. That was a mistake, because an underground group has been trying to take down Hope, and now they have their man in Gooding. Turns out to be a good choice.



This is one of those big brother cautionary tales of what happens when we let corporations have too much control and too much influence in our government. Makes sense, though you could've spent a lot less money by just documenting the current healthcare crisis, no? What's even funnier is, by its very nature, this film stands to give corporations what they want: a new avenue for exposure. Maybe having the Golden Arches on the Hoover Dam is supposed to tell us how bad things could get, but it also reminds me that I could use a Big Mac, no? Also, any originality this film could've claimed was already taken by the Bruce Payne film Paranoia 1.0, which did the same thing in a much cooler and more stylistic manner-- and without all the product placement too. So what are we left with: a semi-remarkable sci-fi actioner with Cuba Gooding jr., Michael Ironside, and a Val Kilmer with a horrible hairdo.

It's true that maybe I'm being a little hard on this, because, after all, it is just a DTV movie. But so was Streets of Blood, and that film was great. Not only that, it would've been better with Cuba Gooding jr. and Michael Ironside accompanying Kilmer and Sharon Stone. The other point is Command Performance, with just Dolph in it, was a lot more fun to watch. Cuba Gooding jr. and Val Kilmer are great actors, but giving Kilmer bad hair and even worse dialog, and then making Gooding jr. have these silly scowling expressions on his face and even worse responses to Kilmer's bad dialog, just makes us wonder what happened to them as actors, and think they've fallen so far. Why not just cast Lorenzo Lamas and John Rhys-Davies? At least we have more to make fun of, and Kilmer and Gooding jr. can be Kilmer and Gooding jr. somewhere more respectable.



This is the first of probably many Cuba Gooding jr. films that we'll have here, because he's amassed quite a DTV oeuvre over the past few years. Oh, what fun we'll have, you and me. You the Oscar winner, and me the guy who's about to review American Ninja 2-- for the second time! Of course, I make fun of you for this, but Hardwired was better than Pearl Harbor, Radio, and Men of Honor, just to name three. Maybe you're making out better in this deal. We'll keep in touch.

This is the second Val Kilmer film we've done this week, and let me tell you, though Columbus Day was about as good of a movie as Hardwired, Kilmer's part was way worse in this one. The biggest offender was the hair. When you see the cover in stores or on Netflix, you'll see a Kilmer with a slick cut, low and tight. Not so in the actual film. He looks like either a reject from a failed 80s New Wave band, or one of the crew members on the warehouse ship in Space Mutiny. The only explanation was that he didn't want us to recognize him in this film. No such luck. Hey, didn't you used to act in Oliver Stone movies?



I hate commercials. More than anything, I hate the lowest common denominator view they have of the world. Take the MasterCard Priceless thing. Their main goal was to create a catch phrase that seeped into popular culture, and once people bit and started using the phrase on signs at sporting events so they could look clever and get on TV, we were stuck with that smug voice telling us "...Priceless...". Their whole raison d'etre is to stick their product into our brains in whatever way imaginable, and pat themselves on the back for it afterwards. That makes this movie all the more pointless, because no company would consent to something like this, when they can do it much cheaper the old fashioned way. Or, they could just agree to have their logo plastered all over a movie, like they did here.

I want to say you shouldn't watch this, that you're just in for some pain, but after my whole review, I have a different take. Hardwired is a unique opportunity to see how the mighty have fallen. Look at Kilmer's hair and Gooding jr.'s scowl, and not only laugh, but know that we all are only a couple Radios, Daddy Daycares, Island of Dr. Moreaus, and The Saints away from the same fate. If there's any cautionary tale in this film, it's that one. Also of note, the end sets us up for a sequel with who else as the owner of Hope Industries: Lance Henriksen.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1405412/

Columbus Day (2008)

My plan this week was to review Val Kilmer's new film, Hardwired, which was released the same day as Command Performance, but unfortunately Netflix didn't have enough copies of it, so I have to wait. Maybe by Friday. Anyway, since I had this other Val Kilmer film in the can, I figured I'd review it now, and if I get Hardwired soon, I'll just review that too.

Columbus Day has Kilmer as a con man who pulls off a huge heist of drugs, and is now waiting to find someone he can sell them to. The only catch, it's Columbus Day, and all the banks are closed, meaning the only guy with enough cash to buy the drugs is the guy from whom he stole them. So he spends the day in the city park, talking to a boy whose mom is at work while he has the day off from school. He's also trying to patch things up with his estranged wife and daughter, and the plan is to take this drug money down to Florida so he can be with both of them. The question is, will he survive?



I don't know what to say about this one. If it didn't have the cast it did, with Kilmer, Marg Helgenberger, and Bobb'e J. Thompson (who played Ronnie in Role Models), I can't see myself liking it. But it did have those people, and that gave it a flavor it otherwise wouldn't have had. All three of them were better actors than the material, which, in the end, was your run-of-the-mill heist/scam/twist suspense yarn with a not-so-nice protagonist seeking redemption for the mess he's made of his life. There wasn't much to make fun of in it either, so really, you're only going into this for its quality, and on that score it was only mediocre.

My friend at Movies in the Attic (whose site is temporarily down after the recent dismantling of Geocities) is of the opinion that Kilmer deserves better than the fate he's currently been given as a DTV actor. I agree with him so far as one can tell from the beginning that he is well beyond the quality of the material he's working with here; but where does one see Kilmer fitting in in mainstream Hollywood? Certainly not a leading man. He was great in The Doors, but playing Jim Morrison requires a unique set of talents that very few other leading roles ask for. I personally didn't like The Saint or Batman Forever, but thought he was amazing in Wonderland. I guess what I'm saying is, in order for him to be a leading man, he may need to go the DTV route for the most part, and take his Jim Morrisons and John Holmeses when they come.



I liked Role Models, and a big reason why was Bobb'e J. Thompson. Sure, the name doesn't make much sense (do you need the apostrophe? I hope that's just a SAG thing), but the kid was probably the best actor in that whole movie, and here was third to Marg Helgenberger and Val Kilmer. I imagine after Role Models, we won't see him again in DTV films for a while, unless he goes the Todd Bridges path. Let's hope for his sake he doesn't.

This film also featured Wilmer Valderama. If Bobb'e is a silly name, Wilmer is even worse. I guess they can both feel better knowing their name isn't D'Brickishaw or Knowshawn, right? Anyway, like Dustin Diamond and Jaleel White, Valderama is cursed with the reputation of playing a geeky gross guy on a teen sitcom. Unlike Diamond and White, he's done better for himself after by owning popular LA restaurants and dating starlets like Lindsey Lohan. Even though I still thought of him as Fez when I watched this movie, and I don't know if Fez or Wilmer is the better name, I definitely believed him here as the guy trying to link Kilmer with a buyer. If anything, he learned from the mistakes of Diamond and White, et al, and he's gotten right out in front of this TV reputation thing.



I used to write freewrite blogs on MySpace to get my creative juices flowing while I worked on my novel, and one of the blogs was about a fictitious movie trilogy called the Columbus Day Blowout. I did it in response to a commercial for the Santa Clause movies calling them the "greatest holiday trilogy of all time." In hindsight, The Labor Day Blowout would've been a more apt film, because the weather in Vermont in Rocktober can be a little chilly. Anyway, I didn't actually think that anyone would make a movie based on Columbus Day, and though this one is about something entirely different from the one I came up with, it's still kind of a cool concept to base a film on a holiday that we don't usually think of. Maybe the next one will be The Grandparents Day Massacre.

You're not going to be hurting yourself by skipping this. Maybe if you're a huge Kilmer fan you'll want to give it a try, and he's good here, but otherwise it's not so hot. Also, there's very little action, and very little to make fun of, so on that score it's not worth it either. I'm not saying it's a horrible movie, and if it's on TV you could do a lot worse by watching it, I just thought it was pretty unremarkable, and am not sure it's worth a spot on your Netflix queue.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1015976/

Streets of Blood (2009)

This was suggested to me when I was adding other movies to my queue. I added it purely on the strength of Val Kilmer, 50 Cent, and Sharon Stone. The idea of a new DTV film with those three actors intrigued me.

Streets of Blood takes place in the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans. Kilmer and 50 play narcotics cops trying to maintain order as drug cartels from around the country try to fill the vacuum left by the devastation. Sometimes they have to bend the rules, and the question is are they doing it for the right reasons, or the wrong ones. Sharon Stone is the precinct's psychiatrist, and she's called in from time to time to evaluate their psyche. Now the FBI is causing problems, and FBI agent Michael Biehn sees an opportunity for power in the rebuilding city. That's not the worst part. There's a snitch for the FBI in their squad, and Kilmer doesn't know who he can trust.



This was a really good movie. I didn't like the end-- it kind of betrayed the way the characters were written-- but otherwise, this was good. I don't mean good because you can make fun of it good, I mean really good. Kilmer, Stone, Biehn, and 50 Cent all turned in solid performances. I didn't have a problem with Kilmer's New Orleans accent, or Stone's Southern Drawl. The story was solid, except for the end, and I think there they just wrote themselves into a corner. I mean, it was no The Departed, but not much is, and even The Departed had a bad ending.

I didn't intend to review another crime drama set in post-Katrina New Orleans so soon after Death Toll (Death Tool is more like it), but I'm glad it worked out that way. The people who made the sack of asscrack that was Death Tool can look at this and see how it's supposed to be done. Dialog that makes sense, characters that are both conflicted yet have realistic motivations, and a story that makes us care about what happens in the end. And you wanna know what else? The director calls himself Charles Winkler. What? No "Phenomenon"?



I've always been a big Val Kilmer fan, so I was worried he might mail this one in. No worries, he turned in a great performance. It wasn't quite John Holmes in Wonderland, but he also didn't have that kind of material to work with. Now I'm excited to see him in more stuff. According to imdb he has like 11 projects in various stages of development, but he also has like five or six other DTV films that have come out recently. Where I was for that? None of my video stores got those. I'll start pouring through those ASAP. Also, in November, he's in the Werner Herzog film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which should be good. By the way, if you have Netflix, you should look him up on there. He has the funniest picture ever.

I can't believe I'm going to say this. 50 Cent was good. I know, I know, someone should check my forehead to see if I had a fever. Now, his lack of acting ability did show at the end when the writers abandoned him and made his character lose his direction, because he wasn't able to pick up the slack there the way Kilmer did. He has a DTV film coming out called Before I Self Destruct, which he not only acts in, but wrote, produced, and directed. I'll probably pass on that one. I don't see Fitty as the next Orson Welles.



Rounding out the cast we had Michael Biehn and Sharon Stone. Biehn's bad FBI agent came across exactly like the bad agent he played in Art of War. I found a few films in his DTV repertoire that might be good, but usually when a DTV film wants Michael Biehn, they settle for the Night Eyes guy, because he makes a pretty good poor man's Biehn. Sharon Stone's a different ball game. She was huge in the 90s, and then that was it. I'm surprised she can't get more roles like the one in this film in bigger motion pictures. I looked up Basic Instinct 2, and according to imdb, it only grossed $5 mill in the box office. Hmm... I wonder...

This isn't a fun DTV action movie, it's a solid crime drama. If you're in the mood for a serious movie, this is a good outside of the box choice if you see it at your local video store. Beyond the story and acting, it also gives us a look into what New Orleans is like three years later. I'd call this another one of those DTV hidden gems.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1203523/