The Detonator (2006)

This is the fifth Wesley Snipes film we've done, which isn't a lot considering he's up for DTVC Hall of Fame consideration in the future. On the one hand, I should probably watch more Snipes films, but on the other, the first couple he did that I reviewed weren't that good, and so he was pushed down the totem pole a bit. I'm sure he has other things to worry about, though, like serving time in a federal prison for tax evasion, so I doubt he'll raise too much of a stink for not being given enough recognition here at the DTVC.

The Detonator has Snipes as a federal agent or cop or something undercover in Romania buying AK-47s off a dealer. Things go bad, but he's given a shot to redeem himself if he protects a woman linked to a Romanian mob boss. Thing is, the mob boss is also looking to buy a biological weapon off a Ukrainian, and the woman is holding the bank codes so he can pay for it. Now Snipes is really in it, and every time he thinks he can trust someone, he ends up in the shitter.



This was okay. A couple okay car chases. A couple okay fight scenes. A couple okay shootouts. Just plain okay. I'm not saying it was bad. I liked it all right. But there was no "Oh my God... that was awesome!" feeling afterward. Not like the way I felt after watching Blade 2, for instance. When I think of a movie called Detonator, I'm definitely thinking more a bomb strapped to Ron Pearlman's head more than some biological weapon that Snipes really has nothing to do with. He should've at least been a detonator of some sort.

But what I did see was what made Snipes cool in Blade. He had the smooth martial arts skills that make him unique from his fellow action stars. There was one scene toward the end where the bad guys have him hand-cuffed in the back of a car, and he reveals to them that he's able to take them off, and as they're realizing that he's free, he takes them all out. This movie definitely had more of that than say The Contractor, which was a total plus, but to make the Hall of Fame, we need those seminal pics: his Bridge of Dragons, or Out for a Kill, or Fortress. What we need is Blade 4: DTV.



This is another Snipes in Romania film, the other I reviewed being 7 Seconds. He's not the only one going there to do films. Seagal, Van Damme, and Dolph have all had movies filmed there. They also seem to like Bulgaria. How does that work? Is there a rivalry between those two countries, like Sweden and Norway? Are they trying to one up each other as a destination for DTV action movie shoots? I know Romanians speak a Romance language, while Bulgarian is Slavic; throw the Hungarians in there, who speak a Uralic language, which isn't even from the Indo-European family, and you got quite an eclectic quite a mix. Is this the future of DTV action, filming in Eastern Europe? The Canadians must be up in arms. How will all those Stargate actors get work to pad their resumes?

There's some weird thing with the main baddie's club soccer team, where at the end they're playing for a spot in the world championships, which take place in Washington DC. What? First off, what European soccer tournament exists where Romanian teams dominate? Rapid Bucharest taking down Man U? I don't see it. I know it's a movie, but how hard would it be that this bad guy is taking a lowly Romanian team and bringing them prominence in the domestic league, and earning a Champion's League spot? Even better, maybe they play one of the bigger European clubs and upset them. Second, why bring the US into it? It's not like they ended up using the trip to DC as a front to get the bomb in. I'm a huge soccer fan, so it annoyed me quite a bit that they invented some tournament that the US hosts, and made these two Romanian teams compete for a shot in the finals, for no reason at all. It just made no sense. [What did make sense was just seeing Villa come from ahead to choke away a 2 goal lead to Stoke, leaving the door open for my Gunners to gain that coveted fourth spot in the league. Go Arsenal!]



The female lead is played by an Italian woman named Silvia Colloca. As you can imagine, she's extremely attractive. I'm not sure how warm it is in Bucharest, but she spent almost the entire film in a skimpy tank top that showed off her stomach. Anyway, I looked her up on imdb, and she's in a film that will be released soon in England called Lesbian Vampire Killers. It looks pretty sweet, but it also looks like a mainstream release kind of deal, so it may not turn up on the DTVC-- if it ever makes it to the US anyway.

The verdict is still out on Wesley Snipes. If this had been the first DTV film of his I'd seen, I'd think he's showing a lot of promise as a potential Hall of Famer. It's really not that bad, it's just not amazing. At the very least, we can say he flexes his martial arts muscles more than he has in all the other films of his I've reviewed here, except maybe The Art of War 2. The next film of his I'll look at is The Marksman, so we'll see what happens.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0345461/

Guardian Angel (1994)

Cynthia Rothrock was inducted into the imdb Hall of Fame recently, and I've been trying to get as many of her films up as possible. That's proven to be doubly challenging. First, I have so many other films that need to get up as well, it's hard to fit her in; and second, a lot of her films just aren't on DVD, which makes it harder to get at them when I can't get them through Netflix.

Guardian Angel is about Rothrock as a cop whose fiance is killed on the job by a woman set-up by the counterfeiter she works for. Depressed, Rothrock turns in her badge and moves into an RV. She's hired as a bodyguard by a man that needs her protection from the same woman that murdered her fiance. It's the chance at revenge she's wanted, but is it worth it?

This wasn't all that bad. Solid action and martial arts. Not as action packed as some of her other work, and the woman playing the bad guy (bad gal, I guess) wasn't very convincing as someone that could challenge Rothrock. Brian Thompson was better in Rage and Honor as her bad guy. This is what it is: good bad action, but there's nothing very spectacular about it.

This is the fifth Rothrock film I've done, but only the third that she's been the star in. The other two were the Rage and Honors, and this pales in comparison to those. When she and her partner go to a party undercover, their style was like a woman from a Color Me Badd Video, which was a unique touch for one of her films that I had to appreciate. What we really want to see is her great martial arts skills though, and she does display those often enough for this to be a solid performance.

Marshall Teague plays her fiance. You may remember him as the guy in Road House who tells Swayze he used to fuck guys like him in prison, to which Swayze wastes no time in ripping his throat out. In this film he's barely there, so I'm wondering if he had too many TV detective shows booked. He was in everything: Columbo, MacGyver, PS I Love You. And he's still in everything. Okay, maybe not. I don't know why I said that.

Art Camacho sneaks in here with a bit part. I know I keep saying I'll have to go through and tag every film he's had some association with. Right now it's just the ones he's directed. I have a feeling when all is said and done he may be tagged more times than our hero Dolph Lundgren. If that's the case, I may have to avoid tagging him until I get more Lundgren up there so Dolph's still the main man. It'll be like pitchers in the Japanese league walking Kevin Bass so he wouldn't break Sadaharu Oh's home run record.

One final thought, the description from Netflix is for a totally different movie. I don't know what it is, but it's a better movie than this one, at least it sounds like it. This happens often, and if you're using Netflix to watch the kinds of movies I do, just be aware of it. The movie you're expecting may not be the movie you get.

There are plenty of Rothrock films to watch before this one, and really it's just a poor job on my part to not get my hands on things like China O'Brien and Lady Dragon, and instead inundate you with this good but not great kind of fare. I'll see what I can do to get her more iconic work up here.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109950/

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

AVH: Alien vs. Hunter (2007)

Some people think I'm a glutton for punishment going back to The Asylum like I do, and they're probably right. But Da Vinci Treasure was really good, and I Am Omega wasn't so bad, so I figured I'd give them another crack at it. This picture seemed like a logical next step.

Alien vs. Hunter has William Katt as a writer in a small California town that's been invaded by aliens. A small group of townspeople join up with him to try and escape them or kill them. As the movie goes on, they notice that one alien seems to want to kill the other. Eventually they kill the bad alien, and the seemingly good one disappears back into space.



The thing with this movie that I never considered going into it was: the movies it's ripping-off are silly and campy already. It's like, why am I watching a silly and campy rip-off then? Is William Katt enough? Probably not. Not only that, but a good chunk of this film is just people yelling at each other about what the next course of action should be. Did they not see AVP? The awesomeness was in the Predator fighting the Aliens. But since neither was alien was cool in this, and they didn't really have the two fight each other that often, it was just plain lame.

I haven't seen William Katt in anything in a while. Probably since the House movies. On imdb, I saw a film called Snake Island listed, and one user commented "It should've been called Suck Island". That just sounds too amazing to be true, so it's in my Netflix queue as we speak. In this film, he was classic William Katt, and I was hoping he would find a box with a superhero outfit in it and take out both aliens with his new superpowers, and then fall in the ocean because he wasn't any good at flying. The last scene could've been him on a couch with a blanket around him shivering, with Dedee Pfeiffer taking his temperature. Had the people making this been cool enough to think of that, AVH would've been cooler than AVP. Unfortunately it seems only I think of things like that.



I've always wanted a Batman vs. Predator movie, and I can only assume the recent success of The Dark Knight and the non-success of the second AVP will mean that my dream may never happen. Ugh! I don't want to take anything away from Heath Ledger's amazing performance, but the most amazing thing ever would be an Adam West style Batman fighting a Predator played by a comedic actor. He'd have a hot chick and some random guys in henchmen suits, and he'd rob a bank using some fluorescent green gas that knocks everyone out. Again, why am I the only one who thinks of things like that? Look, it's a call from Commissioner Gordon. "Batman, the Gotham City Bank was robbed yesterday. Eye witness accounts described a man with dreadlocks, like a Jamaican or Manny Ramirez. That can only mean... " I know, the Predator!

That was a major digression, but there really isn't much more to talk about in this one. Dedee Pfeiffer was the other name in the film, and she's in another The Asylum feature ripping off Journey to the Center of the Earth. On imdb I saw a film she did back in 1995 called Deadly Past that also has Mark Dacascos. It's not out on DVD yet, but Dacascos is making a case for Hall of Fame induction, so anything I can get of his will help. I got a couple others lined up anyway.



Next up from The Asylum is Universal Soldiers. Speaking of that, word on the street is Dolph and Van Damme are lined up to do another Universal Soldiers picture soon. I looking forward to that, and you'll know that whenever we here at the DTVC know something, you'll know something too.

Don't bother on this one. Just see the real AVPs instead. They're way more fun, and they actually have the Predator in it. I just want too say, Hollywood, call me and let's talk about getting this Batman vs. Predator off the ground. It'll be great.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1094162/

Hot Boyz (1999)

This film has some first grade talent: Busey, C. Thomas Howell, Snoop, Jeff Speakman, Master P, and Clifton Powell. I figured it couldn't go wrong. The only thing that could derail it would be if it ignored that great talent and focused on someone else, like Silkk The Shocker. They wouldn't do that, would they?

They did. Hot Boyz is about Silkk as a dude in LA whose girlfriend is wrongly accused of killing a cop. Gary Busey and C. Thomas Howell are corrupt cops that want to catch the other corrupt cop that really killed the cop, not Silkk's girl. Anyway, they want him to go undercover and get evidence, but as he does, his girl is killed in jail by that bad cop. Silkk goes over the deep end, and he and the boys he grew up with start their own gang and kill hundreds of people. Then the net finally drops, but for some reason Silkk, after killing hundreds of people, is let out of jail on a technicality.



What? Where do I start? First, I understand Master P wanted to use this film to showcase Silkk the Shocker so he could make more money off him, but when he surrounded him with the talent he did, it left us wondering why they were all playing second fiddle. Snoop Dogg as an underling in Silkk the Shocker's gang? Not a chance. And Master P himself has a great scene where he's being interrogated-- but it's his only scene, and it just left me wanting more. Why weren't Master P and Snoop Dogg just kicking ass and taking names in some kind of new age Fred Williamson-type flick?

The plot was ridiculous. First, killing off the girl was a bad move. Then having him start a gang when he was unbelievable in that role was dumb. Finally, having an epilogue where Silkk gets out of jail leaves the story with a "huh?" kind of bad after taste. Baller Blockin' this definitely wasn't. They knew better than to kill off the girl, they made the cops sufficiently corrupt, and the overall level of charm was higher.



This was all right as far as Busey went. He's first billed, which is slightly misleading. Silkk was supposed to be the star. Obviously I think Busey should be in any movie as much as possible, no matter what it is. I absolutely loved Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler, but each would've been that much better with Gary Busey in them. Speaking of which, why doesn't Busey have an Oscar? He should've gotten best supporting actor in 1991 for Point Break over Jack Palance, but that's neither here nor there...

There isn't much C. Thomas Howell. He plays a detective that works under Busey. With the momentum from The Da Vinci Treasure, I was hoping to build on it with another great performance-- and he was good-- but there just wasn't enough here to work with. Like Master P and Snoop Dogg, they all did well, I just wished they could've been in it more. Silkk the Shocker should've been the one with the limited role.



Because this and Baller Blockin' were both made by competing New Orleans rap outfits, I thought it necessary to compare the two in an earlier paragraph. One thing the two have in common is Anthony Johnson, the guy who plays the crackhead in Friday. The only thing is on imdb he's not listed in the credits of Baller Blockin', so you won't find it on his bio. As with everything else in Baller Blockin' they use this comedic actor much better than Hot Boyz did. The crazy cop was funny, while the stuttering, jealous member of the gang didn't work for me. One of his best attributes is his fast speech, so making him a stutterer ruins that.

This movie was sauteed in wrong sauce right from the start, from conception to production. Every good move they made was coupled and trebled by myriad bad moves. I just don't get people who make movies sometimes. Avoid this, and watch Baller Blockin' and then Point Break again instead.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0191191/

Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988)

We're just plugging along with the Howling series, trying to make it to part VI, which has the inimitable Bruce Payne. After this one, though, I'm getting worried. I don't know if I can make it to VI. I know, I only have one more, but if V is like IV, I may die on the inside, and no one wants that.

Howling IV is about an author having bad nightmares who goes up to a cabin in a small California town with her husband. Turns out, the town is just a bunch of werewolves. Even the doctor. He made it through med school despite his werewolf-ness. Anyway, she catches on, and she has to trap them in some church tower or something and set them on fire. Even if it's a fierce, murderous werewolf, that's still a pretty rough way to go.



Snooze-fest. Hard to deal with. Lots of nothing going on. It's supposed to be ramping up the suspense aspect, but because we already know the big surprise is werewolves, there's no mystery, hence the whole trying to keep us in suspense thing was annoying. Some of the werewolves looked cool, which actually wasn't a good thing, because it just pissed me off even more that they weren't featured better in the film.

The only one I recognized was the guy from The Pretender. He has a great voice, and he shows off his man-chest some, but do I really care? I tried watching The Pretender once, but it sucked ass hella. The premise sounded hot, but I think you really need great writers to pull something like that off, and they didn't have them. As an aside, he did a movie with Peter Coyote called Written in Blood that I saw on one of the Encore channels a while back, and I could've sworn I posted it when I first started the blog. Apparently I haven't. Weird how that stuff works.



The female lead had that late 80s hotness that kind of sneaks up on you, but when it gets you, it's there. Her hair was a little big, and her skirts and dresses were all cut at weird angles, but there was something about her... I'm not going to pull one of those "women just looked better back then" because they definitely look hot today too. It's more like I didn't know what to make of this woman at the beginning of the film, and by the end she was irresistible. She was one of the bright spots in an otherwise lackluster sack-of-asscrack.

The guy from The Pretender plays the woman's husband, and she also has her agent, who's a hunky Australian. This brings up a common fact of life regarding women in America: no matter how hot you are, you'll never be hotter than an Aussie to them. That goes for Scots, the Irish, the English, and anyone who speaks a romance language as a first language. How do you counter this fellas? Do what I do: learn to imitate accents. It worked like a charm one night when I was out with some friends, and the girls we were with were taken by these travelling British soccer players. My imitating the accent made it silly and less exotic. Unfortunately, that strategy didn't work for the guy from The Pretender, because he turned into a werewolf. That's part two of the advice fellas: don't become a werewolf.



This is the fourth werewolf film we've reviewed here, which is one fewer than snakes, two fewer than zombies, and three fewer than vampires. Considering three of the four werewolf films are Howlings, that means we don't do werewolves much at the DTVC. I think that has to do with the actors more than the films: the big-time hall of famers just prefer vampires and zombies to werewolves. I'm not sure I blame them. Werewolves are hairy, and vampires generally aren't.

Skip this. Let me suffer the inanity so you won't. I'm going to soldier through so I can make it to part six for my ladies at Payne's Angels. If you haven't you should check out their site. There's a link to it on my page here. It's a better use of your time than watching this horrible movie.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095334/

Cyborg 2 (1993)

I first saw this on Spike really late at night. The crazy thing about it is that it flew completely under my radar. It came out in 1993, but I had no idea it existed until like 2006. And not only that, it has Oscar winners Jack Palance and Angelina Jolie in it. I figured with the Academy Awards last Sunday, this would be an apt post.

Cyborg 2 takes place some time in the future after the first one. Things are somewhat better, and two companies, Pinwheel and Kobayashi are vying for corporate supremacy in the field of cyborg technology. Pinwheel has created a cyborg that doubles as a bomb, and they've made Angelina Jolie into one. Elias Koteas is her fight trainer, and Jack Palance, playing a disembodied voice, convinces the two of them to escape Pinwheel. Pinwheel sends the always gross Billy Drago after them, but Pinwheel's CEO has other plans, and he sends a cyborg of his own to get things done. Palance manages to get the two on a ship to Mombasa, the free-zone for cyborgs.



This wouldn't have been a bad film, except for Billy Drago. Not only was he in it, which was bad enough, but they made his face all bad after he gets glass in it. Eww. He has a fight scene with Koteas at the end, but with a gross face, I didn't enjoy it. Why do people do things like this? Whose idea was it to A: have Billy Drago, and B: make him grosser than he already is? He was all preening in the mirror and pulling his face apart like he's trying to make himself look nice for William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, and it made me cringe the whole time.

I'm not saying it totally ruined the film. The future was pretty cool. I'm not sure what happened to the great Atlanta from the first one, but this was a pretty bleak time. Koteas, Jolie, and Palance were all good. What wasn't Billy Drago all gross was pretty awesome actually. But like Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight, the specter of Drago lurking made even the scenes he wasn't in intense.



Obviously The DTVC doesn't come across Oscar winners often, so when we get one, it's kinda a big deal. This time we got two. Jack Palance technically did win in 1991 for City Slickers despite the fact that Gary Busey should've won for Point Break; and then there's Angelina Jolie. I realized when looking her up on imdb that other than this and Hackers, I haven't seen any of her films. I think I saw five minutes of a Tomb Raider movie on TNT, and who knows why that was. Anyway, even with Elias Koteas and Jack Palance, Jolie is head-and-shoulders the better actor/actress. I didn't realize she's only 33 years old. That's four more than me, but also 12 less than Brad Pitt. I don't know why, but I always thought she was older and closer in age to him.

Speaking of Brad Pitt, Elias Koteas was in the Oscar nominated The [notso] Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Personally, I liked his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Crash better than either this movie or the one that garnered all the award nominations. And let's be clear, the Crash I'm talking about is the good one with James Spader, not the sack-of-asscrack that won best picture when Brokeback Mountain was ten times better. Also, Koteas is the second TMNT alum featured on the DTVC, Corey Feldman being the first.



I wasn't sure what to do about tagging Jean-Claude Van Damme. He's in it in the form of clips from the previous movie. I guess I'll tag him, and then whoever reads it can see that he's really not in it, only sorta kinda. Word on the street is that he and Dolph are teaming up again for another Universal Soldier. I hope it's DTV, though if it is in the theater, I'll make an exception and review it here.

If you think you can handle the Drago grossness factor, I say give this a shot. It may just be something wrong with me, too. Most people probably don't find Drago that gross, even when his face is all cut up and falling apart. This isn't as good as the first Cyborg, but how many Godfather II's are there out there anyway? It's good for what it is.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106639/

Terminal Justice aka Cybertech PD (1995)

I really don't know where I first came across this. I was probably drunk and fooling around on Netflix, and added it to my queue because the cover had Lorenzo Lamas, then was shocked when it showed up on my doorstep, wondering when in the hell I could've put that one in. Then it was like "well, since I have it, I might as well watch it."

Terminal Justice aka Cybertech PD has Lorenzo Lamas rocking blue contacts in the year 2008. If that doesn't sound ridiculous enough, this so-called future we just lived through last year has virtual reality sex as it's big thing. Sorry Wii, you just weren't cool enough. Anyway, this one chick is a great virtual reality sex star, and Chris Sarandon wants her blood so he can clone her. The only thing better than Virtual reality sex, is sex with a clone. Lamas isn't a fan of Sarandon anyway, and when he and this sex star fall in love, he's all about protecting her and bringing him down.



Wow. Why? How long was it? Really, not three hours? This movie was hardcore. I knew it when I saw Lamas' eyes. Why would you do that? He looks like a moron with blue contacts. And did the people who made it stop to consider for one second what 1982 was like compared to 1995? Yeah, there were some great advancements in technology, but enough to make them think that from 1995 to 2008 we'd invent something that acts like the holodeck on Star Trek? Or that our entertainment industry would change so drastically that it would fail to resemble the one that existed before? If this had been silly enough, I would've ignored all that, but I just couldn't get past Lamas' eyes.

And with that, this film also surpasses Succubus: Hell Bent as Lamas' worst. In that one, he was barely in the film for more than five minutes, which was why I rank it so poorly. This one he was in plenty, but he was never really in it with those blue contacts. The idea was supposed to be he had his eyes removed by some baddies in the Russian Cartel Wars (they never show that, which is good), and they're replaced by cybernetic ones that act like cameras and can see things in infrared and whatnot. Again, technology we picked up from 1995 to 2008. Right. What a waste of Lamas this was. His only great moment came when he had flashbacks to his time in the war, where he'd freak out on this drug called Hellraiser. That was hilarious.



It is a weird thing to be 8 years beyond the year 2000, considering before it there was this idea that the world was going to be so different after it. It was like the difference between 1999 and 2000 was a hundred years. Okay, so maybe most of us didn't really think that, and were much more pragmatic, but plenty of sci-fi film makers did. It looks so ridiculous now. I mean, I'm not expecting them to have predicted the iPod, but a little more creativity beyond simply Virtual Reality sex isn't too much to ask. I also don't understand why they put these false constraints on themselves with futures that aren't that far in the future. Bump it up thirty years, and it'll be at least a little more believable.

I couldn't decide whether to devote this paragraph to Kari Wuher or Peter Coyote, both DTV movie veterans that both star in this film. I took a different route, choosing to talk instead about Tod Thaley, who plays Lamas' partner after his first one dies. This guy wasn't too bad of an actor, and from what I could tell, he usually plays Native Americans, while in this movie he played an Japanese American. Of course, when I say not too bad of an actor, remember that it's in the context of a mid-90s Lorenzo Lamas sci-fi actioner.



Finally, I cannot in good conscience discuss this film without mentioning the hilarious remote control helicopter with a gun that chased Lamas because it was trained to track his pheromones. How this scene wasn't cut the moment after it was shot is beyond me. It was so ridiculous. This was almost as funny as Freddy's hand running around in Wes Craven's A New Nightmare. And then Lamas sprays himself in Lysol to mask his scent. Good thinking. He's a resourceful hero. Too bad he didn't have a more resourceful agent, huh?

Stay as far away as you can from this. I mean it. It hurt. It's got Lamas in it. So what? He's got blue eyes which make him look silly. After that this sack-of-asscrack has nothing going for it. If you need a Lamas fix, rent Renegade on DVD.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114648/