TC 2000 (1993)

It took me a little time to track this down, otherwise I'd have done it by now. Just look at that cast. It's huge, robust, dare I say prodigious. I don't remember when I first saw it, probably on TNT or a buddy rented it. It's definitely the kind of film that I made the DTVC for, so it's good to finally be getting after it.

TC 2000 takes place in the future, after the environment has deteriorated, and any humans with means have moved underground, leaving the topside an impoverished wasteland. Billy Blanks and Bobbie Phillips are police officers who keep surface dwellers from getting underground, but after they're ambushed by a gang of them, led by Jalal Merhi, and Phillips ends up dead, Blanks is wrongly accused of her death, and he flees to the surface, where Bolo Yeung teaches him the power of the Chi; while Phillips is turned into a cyborg, and she's sent to the surface to do something for her old boss, who it turns out is a bad guy, with a bad guy right-hand man played by Matthias Hues.



This is fantastic. This is the kind of movie the blog was made for, and the kind of movie you come here to check out. Great martial arts, great stars, and a futuristic plot set in the boiler room of a factory. Does it get any better than that? This is early 90s DTV action at its best, tons of fun, tons of action, and nothing to take too seriously: the perfect combination. Get the crew together and fire it up for your bad movie night.

How do you not love Billy Blanks? He's had better martial arts in some of his other films, but this one gives him more screen time than a lot of those. And he and Bolo Yeung had great chemistry (more on that later). The one drawback might be that he only wears the shades from the cover a couple times, but I'm not so sure that's a bad thing, because he has tons of close-ups with funny looks on his face, which for me is much better. Would I have liked some better martial scenes-- not that these ones were that bad, just that we've seen better, especially in The King of the Kickboxers-- probably, but overall, Blanks was so great, I didn't mind.



In this picture Bobbie Phillips looks pretty hot, right? And as the cyborg, from the forehead down she really does look hot, it was just her hairdo that didn't work. It was one of those middle of the head ponytails where the hair comes out and flows down over the head. It was the kind of hairdo that the girls with bad dye jobs who wore Adidas track suits to the mall and always got into fights used to have when I was growing up. I don't know, I was half expecting her to talk in wannabe Ebonics and come through the screen to try and steal my Da' Brat CD. "Sooo, sooo, Funktafiiiied..." (Was I the only one whose environment was Suburban Ghetto enough for these girls to exist?)

Matthias Hues is a beast. He even makes Bolo Yeung look small. I know how silly it sounds to do the whole "in real life he could take so and so", but other than Dolph Lundgren, who has similar size and speed, Matthias Hues is someone none of the guys who pretend kick his ass on screen would want anything to do with if he came looking for them with bad intentions. I guess that's why he makes such a great baddie, because he is so big and fast-- and because he has a German accent, let's not forget that.



This review marks a first here at the DTVC. In the past I've uploaded video clips from the movies I reviewed, but this is the first time I ever enhanced one. There are two training montages in TC 2000, and I thought they were both great, but when I cut them together, I noticed the transition was bad between the first and second, so I decided to cover the whole thing with different music. It's on the image page, so take a look at it and tell me what you think. The Bolo Yeung interpretive dance at the beginning was my personal favorite.

This is only available on VHS as far as I know. If you look it up on Amazon, one of the links they'll direct you to is another film, Expect No Mercy, which is on DVD, stars Jalal Merhi and Billy Blanks, but is not the same film. TC 2000 is totally worth picking up if you find it anywhere. Amazon is a little steep, but $5 or so after shipping is worth it, so if you can find it for that, pull the trigger.

For more info:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108277/

Sacrifice (2011)

This DTV bad boy starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Christian Slater, and Kim Coates came out recently and went straight to Netflix Watch Instantly, so it was high on my radar. We've seen recent DTV flicks starring various combinations of this trio not quite do it, so I was hoping all three would be enough to get us to the church on time. Let's see.

Sacrifice takes place in Toronto, and centers around a narcotics cop, Gooding, whose wife and daughter were murdered by men hired by a dude whom he put away; a priest, Slater, looking for meaning in his life after he was the lone survivor of a special forces unit in Afghanistan that was hit by a bomb; a kid looking to get out of the drug cartel he's been working for; and Kim Coates as the head of that cartel. All these people are brought together when the kid steals a statue of the Virgin Mary made out of heroin, which he's hidden in plain sight in Slater's church. He's killed by Coates's men, leaving behind a 5-year-old sister who is taken in by Gooding, only to be kidnapped by Coates's men in order to find his statue. Now Slater and Gooding have to work together to get the girl back and bring Coates to justice.



This was one of those that 15-20 minutes in, I was like "wow, I'm only 15-20 minutes in? It feels like an hour!" I was actually feeling bad for Gooding and Slater, because this looked and felt so bad. It was like one of those low-budget Lifetime movies made on the cheap in Canada with a bunch of Soap stars from here in the States combined with character actors from British Columbia. But then it shifted. The story took on depth and nuance. Slater, Gooding, and Coates were turning in great performances, and the material was keeping up with them. Overall, this film really worked for me, and was a pleasant surprise after the slow opening.

There's a scene where the 5-year-old asks Cuba Gooding Jr. to tell her a story. "Once upon a time, there was a big Hollywood star who won an Oscar and everything. Then he did a movie called Snow Dogs and a movie called Daddy Day Camp, and suddenly, no one was returning his agent's phone calls and no one was sending him scripts, other than people pitching DTV projects." We kid because we love Mr. Gooding Jr., and it can't be that bad at the DTV Hotel when you have neighbors like Val Kilmer and Christian Slater. Even though this movie did end up being really good, the quality of the film stock and whatnot really gave it that low-rent Lifetime movie look that made me feel bad for him. This guy won an Oscar, he really should be making big budget Hollywood flicks or high-quality independent movies-- but while he's here at the DTV Hotel, we're going to do our best to make his stay as nice as possible.



Speaking of Christian Slater, this is now our third of his DTV movies to make it to the DTVC. Like Cuba Gooding Jr., seeing him in these movies is odd, but it's a different kind of odd. With Slater, his voice is so classic, and so recognizable that I can't divorce it from all his great roles I remember growing up. If anyone could be a priest who was a former special forces soldier in Afghanistan, it's him.

The director of Sacrifice was Damian Lee. He's responsible for four other films we've reviewed at the DTVC: Ski School, Moving Target (Dudikoff, not Wilson), Terminal Rush, and Agent Red; plus he has a few others that are in need of reviews eventually, like Abraxas and a Don "The Dragon" Wilson flick called Paper Trail. I wonder how he felt to be working with Gooding and Slater after Dolph Lundgren.



DTVC favorite Kim Coates is back, and he's pretty good as the dude running the drug cartel-- but do you expect anything less from Kim Coates? Also, should we be surprised he's an acting machine, considering he hails from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan? Rowdy Roddy Piper is also from that great city. I've personally never been-- in fact never been to Canada period-- but I'd love to check it out. Hey, if it's good enough for Kim Coates and Roddy Piper, it's good enough for me.

I say go for it with this one. Yes, the beginning is a bit of a drag, but this is a pretty solid and entertaining film overall. I'm not sure what its availability is outside of the US at this moment, but here in the States it was just released on DVD, plus it's available on Netflix Watch Instantly, which makes it less of a risk. It's worth checking out.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1630564/

Bloodfist II (1990)

I've seen this one a few times, including on Spike in 2007, around the time I was starting the DTVC. They played all 8 over the course of a week or so. Somehow, this fell under the radar and I forgot to review it then, which I didn't realize until only a few months ago when I went to look for the post and it wasn't there. Oops. No one I knew had it, and Netflix doesn't carry it anymore, so I finally had to break down and buy it. This does mark the completion of the Don "The Dragon" Wilson Bloodfist Series for us here. Friends of the DTVC who have hit this one before us: Movies in the Attic, Cool Target Action Reviews, and most recently, Ty at Comeuppance Reviews.

Bloodfist II is the only actual sequel, so to speak, in that Wilson plays the same character he did in part 1. Long story short, we have an Enter the Dragon paradigm, with Wilson thinking he's going to save a friend in Manilla from a gambler he owes money to, only to find he's drugged, shackled, and on a boat to an island to fight. "Mr. Lu, I think I'd like to leave your island." After a scuffle, he escapes into the water, comes back to the gambler's compound to get his fighter friends, and ends up captured again and fighting the gambler's 'roid heads. Will he prevail?



This is something of a transitional picture in the Bloodfist series, because, on the one hand it has the Enter the Dragon paradigm, which makes it something of a tournament film like its predecessor, but really it's more like Bloodfists IV-VIII, in that it has that whole anywhere Wilson goes there's a potential ambush he needs to fight his way out of. Yes, Enter the Dragon is a classic, and as something of a remake, Bloodfist II doesn't do it justice; but as a low-budget Wilson martial arts actioner, it really delivers. This is a great time, something you and your friends can get a kick out of, and there aren't any dead spots or any plot to get in the way of your action.

This is one of Wilson's best. No training montages like the first one, nothing to get in the way of just a series of scenes of Wilson getting ambushed and having to kickass his way out of it. I don't know that there's another action star who plays more innocent guys that get ambushed by gangs so often. When you look at, say, Dolph or Seagal, they're usually cops or secret servicemen who go into dangerous places and fight their way out; but Wilson can't go to the corner store for a six-pack without someone trying to kick his ass. And every movie is like that too, it's just expected that the old man with the walker lurking in the background while Wilson is paying his mortgage at the bank knows karate and is waiting to try and kill him.



Rina Reyes played Wilson's love interest/woman on the inside helping him out. She looks like a mix of Kim Cattrall and Lisa Bonet, which means she's really hot. She even rocks silver spandex, which can be very dangerous and unflattering on the wrong figure, but looks great on her. As far as I can tell on imdb, she still works, but mostly in the Philippines. Perhaps the best scene came when she and Wilson had their "moment". It was very 6th grade, how their hands brushed up against each other's, then they looked, asked with their eyes if the other meant that touch, and kissed with smooth jazz playing in the background. I guess they cut out the scene later on when Wilson passed her a note with the question "Be my girlfriend?" and two boxes labeled "Yes" and "No" underneath.

I always try to get my hands on a movie to watch it before I review it, even if I've seen it before, because I almost always forget great moments-- not that I don't forget them when I'm writing the review after having just seen it too! In this one, I had totally forgotten about a scene with Tim Baker at a gym, where Baker tells Wilson "I only talk to fighters when I train", which leads Wilson to jumpkick his punching ball off it's chain and into a sparring ring, hitting one of the fighters in the back. That's a gem that if I don't watch the film again I miss out on, and I'm glad I didn't.



Baker was one of a few great members of the supporting cast, which also included Joe Mari Avellana-- not reprising his role as Kwong from part 1. One of the ones that was interesting was Richard Hill, pictured above, or Rick Hill for short. See where I'm going with this, Rick Hill same name as Deathstalker Rick Hill. In the biography section of the DVD, they actually make this mistake, showing the picture of the guy above-- the guy who was actually in the film-- but then running off the list of accomplishments that the other Rick Hill had had in the industry. How does that happen? Whose job is it to make sure they have the right Rick Hill? And does it really matter? Probably not, right? It kind of gives the DVD character.

For some reason Netflix doesn't have this, but you can buy it new or used on DVD from Amazon, so it doesn't really make any sense. Anyway, if you're into good ol' late 80s/early 90s bad action, this is right in your wheelhouse-- and if you're not, are you sure you have the right blog?

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099155/

Hatchet (2006)

A few months ago, over on my Tumblr blog, Matt, Movie Guy, I made a quick post about how The Social Network was on its way from Netflix, and was it any good. I got a reply telling me it was overrated, and that I should check out Hatchet II instead. I was like, dude, you're at the wrong blog, you need to hit me up at the DTVC, but I'll give it a look. I'd heard some about the first Hatchet, that it was supposed to be a throwback to the 80s horror I liked, that it boasted a pretty stellar cast of horror greats, and that the director, Adam Green, grew up somewhat nearby in Massachusetts. I figured it was finally time to check it out.

Hatchet takes place in New Orleans, where a boy named Victor Crowley, who's hideously disfigured from birth (think Toxic Avenger crossed with Chunk from Goonies). Anyway, he dies after some kids pull a prank on him on Halloween, and he haunts the local swamp. Enter a group of people on a tour run by an unscrupulous Asian, and they're on a collision course to wackiness!



Get out your slide whistle and your rim shots and your "waa waa waaaaaaah", because we're going on a comedic romp. The only thing they didn't do was queue up the Benny Hill music and have Hodder chase the kids around in fast-motion. Hey African American guy, remember when you had a fade back in high school? Ha! That joke was even funnier the three hundred times I've heard it in beer commercials and national cell phone ad campaigns. Hey, remember that Seinfeld episode when some dude made a snide remark to George, and he thought of the comeback later? Hey, let's combine that with the high school fade joke! But wait, it gets better, that's right kids, STD jokes! "But mom, we had STD jokes in the last 30 horror comedies!" "Hey, you kids don't know how lucky you are. There are people making bad horror comedies in Third World countries that wish they had that crabs bit we just did. You just remember that mister!" Don't get me wrong, for about 20-25 minutes at the end, this had some great gore-- my personal favorite was when Kenny from The Cosby Show was felled using the double arm amputation technique, a la Toxic Avenger IV-- and Kane Hodder was great as the villain, with fun cameos from Robert Englund and Tony Todd; but is it worth it if I've got to sit through 40-45 minutes of bad comedy to get to it? Seriously, the only bad joke cliché they didn't go to was the man-purse. Guess they needed to save something for part 2.

We've seen horror comedy done well before. Evil Dead 2 is the best example, but there's also Bad Taste, Dead Alive, Blood Diner, and Bloodsucking Pharaohs from Pittsburgh. The problem here though, is the comedy didn't match the gore, meaning we should've had more of the latter. Think about the great Friday the 13th flicks of the 80s. As the kids were making their way to the camp, people in the area were getting bumped off simultaneously. Break up that 40-45 minutes of nothing with a few good kills here or there, that way if the jokes fall flat, it's not the only thing to hang your hat on. The one gag I did like though was when one of the bimbo's phones went off, and the ringtone was Paula Cole's "I Don't Wanna Wait".



I had to go way back into the archives to find the last time we had a Cosby kid on here, and that was the girl (woman now) who played Rudy Huxtable. She was in Death Toll starring Lou Diamond Phillips, which you probably don't remember me reviewing, but it was pretty rough. Now we have her best friend, Kenny-- oddly enough, both were in films set in New Orleans. What I need to do now is seek out some Theo Huxtable flicks. As I mentioned above, Kenny's double arm amputation death was one of my favorites.

We had some top notch horror talent here, starting with a cameo from Robert Englund. There was another one with Tony Todd, which had a very predictable bad joke about his tour group and insurance issues, but he did his best with it. Then you had Kane Hodder in duel roles as the deformed killer, and his dad. I didn't know this, but Hodder has had small parts in numerous flicks that we're reviewed here in the past-- usually it was something like "Thug #3", but that's still pretty cool. I imagine stunt-wise he's probably been in a lot more. The stars here were Joel (David) Moore, who has been in such classics as Dodgeball and Grandma's Boy; and Tamara Feldman (no relation to Corey as far as I know), who, at the time did a lot of commercials, but now, according to imdb, has a reoccurring role on Gossip Girl. Throw in Kenny from Cosby, and veteran character actor Richard Riehle, and the talent was there to make something really special. Unfortunately the jokes couldn't get them to the church on time.



Check out the shirt Moore is wearing. It's for Newbury Comics, a place that I spent a lot of money at in high school. It's a record store chain in and around Boston, and between the one on Newbury St. and the one in the Garage Mall on Mt. Auburn, I blew I don't know how many paychecks on rare import discs and cool band T-shirts. Bands that are now barely memories, like Oasis, The Prodigy, and Blur; Sponge, The Chemical Brothers, Orbital, and Underworld-- I could go on. Speaking of music, that was another area this film could've killed it on if they wanted to go 80s throwback, but didn't quite do it. Marilyn Manson? Try Dokken baby! Though they did have some good Friday the 13th music for a scene near the lake that mimicked the one in (was it?) Part VII where Jason pops out of the water. That was cool.

Man, this is a tough call, because between the cool cameos and the great gore, this has its moments; but the chunk of time that's lost to bad comedy really hurts it. For most people, it's the gore that's hard to watch, but I guess for me it's hearing the same jokes I've heard over and over for the past ten years. Also, I watched the unrated director's cut, so if you're going to do this, make sure that's the one you get.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0422401/

(PS: Check out the image page for a clip of vintage horror comedy that I uploaded.)

Born to Raise Hell (2010)

I've been waiting to sink my teeth into this dirty SOB for sometime now, and like the dude at the table whose order was screwed up, I waited impatiently as our buddies over at Explosive Action and Straight to DVD Heaven--taking advantage of the fact that this was released in the UK well before we got it over here--enjoyed their meal, paid their bill, tipped their waitresses, and were already out the door before the cook even fired mine off. Those Brits and Aussies with their Region 2 DVDs have all the fun.

Born to Raise Hell has DTVC Hall of Famer Steven Seagal as an international DEA agent working in Bucharest named Samuel Axel (Foley?). Somehow he's put in the path of evil drug dealing and lady raping and killing baddie Darren Shahlavi. Having trouble getting Shahlavi, he twists the arm of a local Russian mobster, and despite the fact that this guy deals enough coke to make Scarface jealous, and has one of his lady's cut off Shahlavi's girl's ears with a pair of garden shears, somehow this guy is all right in Seagal's book because both he and Seagal want to take down Shahlavi. Add bad MTV video effects and edits, then end scene.

You know what? This one was close--rather, it should've been there, and other than the silly effects, getting onto the hour mark, I thought it was going to get there. But with those silly effects, I knew they were trying to cover up some major short comings, so I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and boy did it ever. In a sad and muddled attempt to take what was otherwise silly and try to make it dark, we have the ear cutting off scene. Really? And then, to have a guy do this, only for him to team up with Seagal and get away with everything else he's done, wow. This had so much potential too. It had some of the better Seagal fight scenes I've seen in his newer stuff, and for the first 60 minutes, the story was pretty sweet too--if Seagal as an international DEA agent named Sam Axel is your idea of sweet, and it's definitely mine. It just feels like these modern DTV flicks don't know when enough is enough. It's like they go to the butcher shop, buy a $30 steak, then throw it in the deep fryer. Dude, just poor a little salt on it, and toss it on the grill. If it worked in the 80s and 90s, it works now.

I mean it when I say this was some of Seagal's better recent stuff. He did some great ass kicking, and they actually didn't over edit it, which was refreshing. (No idea why they over edited so many other scenes--steak in the deep fryer again.) The guy just turned 60 a few weeks ago, which is insane, but for him to be nearing that age and do a film with some of his better fight scenes, shows that he could be doing this for a little while longer, which is fine with us. Here's to hoping he's solid in his next flick too.

The one big role Darren Shahlavi has had was in a DTVC favorite, Bloodmoon, also starring Gary Daniels. He plays a baddie here, and he was pretty sweet as well. The problem was, they made him into a Russian with a bad accent. Why? The guy is of Persian ancestry, why not let him use his natural English accent, and have his character be called "The Persian"? That's the problem with these movies, they think they're so cool, but they aren't, not even close. Instead of worrying about how you can graft in a scene of a chick getting her ears cut off with gardening sheers in order to make it fake dark, why not try going back to the traditions these films came from and making something we can enjoy. Also, Shahlavi is a great martial artist, and he barely gets any scenes to showcase that. Huh? I can understand if Seagal is getting up there in age and you don't want the one with him at the end to be too knock-down-drag-'em-out, but there are plenty of Romanians out there you could throw in his path for a few scenes, I don't know, maybe have some dudes start trouble at his club. Please, help me out, throw me a bone for Christ's sake.

Is it just me, or is there an abundance of hot women in Romania in short skirts and big black boots. This movie has all kinds too, hot women as drug mules, hot women serving drinks, hot women assassins, hot women drinking beer naked while watching guys play video games. Probably the prettiest one is the one who meets a bad end at the hands of Darren Shahlavi early in the film. Her rape and murder was one of the few scenes where the MTV edits actually made sense. That's a spot where you want to distort the image and take some of the edge off, while at the same time show us how evil Shahlavi is. When you have a good scene, where your cinematographer actually got you a good shot, is where you want to put a lid on that shit. Seriously, we all have these nice TVs and Blu-Ray players so we can actually see the movie. Again, steak in the deep fryer.

Silly bands at the stash pad? They look like it, don't they? "Seriously Sal, you brought Silly Bands to wrap the cash with? You moron!" "Hey, Vic, whatcha problem, huh? My kids love them shits. It was dark this mornin' when you came and got me. I musta grabbed the wrong thing. It was an honest mistake..." An honest mistake, which is more than I can say for this movie.

For the first hour, other than that bad MTV edit crap, which does die down some as the film goes on, this wasn't a bad flick. But it threw the steak in the deep fryer, and the whole thing turned into a muddled mess from there. Is a 90 minute solid DTV actioner without silly bad music video edits and without a chick getting her ears cut off too much to ask for? Apparently it is in 2011.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1528718/

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/

Nemesis 4: Death Angel (1996)

This is the fourth and final film in Albert Pyun's Nemesis series. I've had it for a little while now, but a few other Pyun films took precedence, so we're finally making it happen today. Let's see how it all shakes out.

Nemesis 4 moves us back to the future, in 2080, when the war between cyborgs and humans is at an uneasy peace, and the warriors from that conflict are now selling out their services to the burgeoning crime syndicates. Enter our hero, Sue Price as Alex, working as an assassin. She's becoming disillusioned with it, and her boss thinks she should retire, but she decides against it, despite a strange visitor who looks like the angel of death. Then things go pear shaped when she mistakenly kills the son of a major crime boss, and he puts a $100 million bounty on her head.



This entry brings the series full circle. We're back to the future, we're back to the intrigue and the cat and mouse games of the first film. I liked the mix of 50s-60s exploitation with some cool Noir-ish and sci-fi themes. It wasn't really an action flick like the previous ones, so that might turn some people off, but I was okay with that. What I had trouble with was the dialog. In some instances it meandered and became repetitive; others it contradicted itself. Price asks Pyun mainstay Norbert Weisser why the crime boss' son didn't have body guards. "His reputation is his protection. He knows if anyone even looks at his son the wrong way he's dead." Okay, good point, only Weisser continues: "But he did have guards, and he gave them the slip. That's why they knew to call [Nicholas Guest's character] so fast to warn him that you might kill him." Okay, so which is it, he doesn't need bodyguards, or he has them but he gave them the slip? This happened enough that it affected the overall quality of the film for me.

Despite the dialog issues, the actual story and style really worked for me. Again, as I mentioned in my reviews of the previous two films, if you have issues with low-budget special effects, this might not work for you, but that's not something I have a problem with. There were a lot of really cool images, like the vintage cars, or the cyborgs in 50s style clothing; plus, the sets were great, with the abandoned, burned out buildings. There were also some images that will test your sensibilities, like the scene where Nicholas Guest's character has cyborg sex with Sue Price. I don't know, I kind of like that Pyun just went for it there, but that's the kind of thing you need to see and decide for yourself.



This is a different Sue Price from parts 2 and 3. In those two, she was portrayed as more like a masculine type hero. Here, though, she's very feminine, wearing dresses and heels-- or often nothing at all-- and having sex with guys. It was one of those areas where Pyun inserts depth into what is an otherwise low-budget sci-fi flick, because he took Price's Alex character, who was essentially a tool created by humans to combat cyborgs, and inserted her into a world where cyborgs and humans were no longer at war with one another. Now she's trying to find her identity-- and her femininity, which is much more difficult when she was created to be a cyborg killing machine of a woman. It worked really well to tie the film together.

I didn't see in the credits where this was shot, and the imdb page doesn't list it. It seems like Eastern Europe somewhere, but I'm not sure. As I mentioned above, it's a pretty cool setting, with the abandoned and burned out buildings. I mentioned in the Game of Death post that Detroit is starting to take on some of that feel, that some of the people making that one said it was like one big studio lot with the mass amount of abandoned buildings. It'll be interesting to see if more films like this one are made in Detroit in the future, as opposed to Bulgaria or Romania. I'm not doing the rah rah American thing, I'm just saying anything to help that area recover the better.



A post on a Pyun flick wouldn't be complete without a look at all the Pyun mainstays that made their way into it. We already mentioned Norbert Weisser and Nicholas Guest, both playing cyborgs. Andrew Divoff plays Price's boss-- I didn't even recognize him; and then Simon Poland, who I thought I recognized as an 80s New Wave singer, but was totally wrong about-- I must've just recognized him from other Pyun films. This has nowhere near that epic cast that the first flick had, and based on how short the run time was, I don't know how you could've fit any of them in it anyway. This cast was good enough.

I'd say this one was my second favorite of the four, after part 1, but that was a hard act to follow anyway. These are all available on Amazon, and though I've seen part 4 listed on DVD, I'm not sure if there's a Region 1 release of it here in America. When in doubt, there's always used VHS.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113949/

The Wind (1987)

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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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

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