Dead Trigger (2017)

I saw this was on Prime, and listed on Dolph's imdb, and it seemed great.  Two-word title, Dolph blowing up zombies, 90-minute runtime.  How can this be bad, right?

Dead Trigger is based off a first-person shooter game I've never played.  In the near future, a virus has turned a huge portion of the population into zombies--not enough though for there to be enough infrastructure to have an evil corporation that wants to monopolize a possible cure.  To get it, they send Dolph and his rag-tag group of zombie killers into a zone full of zombies to find the scientist who think figured it out.  The only thing worse than dealing with zombies, is evil corporations, but we trust Dolph can handle it.

But can we?  This is extremely low-budget, like Asylum pre-Sharknado, maybe even lower budget than that.  Retrograde might be the closest Dolph film I've seen on this level, and there's something about him being in a movie of this quality that feels off.  There are some other names, like Isiah Washington, Oleg Taktarov, and Autumn Reeser--also Dolph flick mainstay James Chalke--, but they--other than Chalke--feel just as out of place.  From there, I think you run into the classic zombie movie dilemma: how do you keep the "zombies walk in, shoot zombies in the head, someone gets bit, repeat" cycle from becoming redundant?  This movie thought the corporation would do it, but they weren't in it enough.  They also tried to add in characters, but they didn't develop them enough either.  It felt like any scene that didn't have Dolph didn't work, and any scene that had Dolph only worked because of him.  I think this could be a fun Dolph Fest addition, for hardcore fans that haven't seen it before, but beyond that, there is so much more Dolph out there that's worth seeing instead.

This is the 50th tag for Dolph here at the DTVC, but I don't know if we can officially say he's the first member of the 50 Club yet, because one of those 50 tags was the Jean-Claude Van Damme film fest for my 400th post.  That's okay, I have a lot more Dolph in the can after I watched a bunch for My Dolph Lundgren List on Letterboxd (https://letterboxd.com/dtvconnoisseur/list/my-dolph-lundgren-list/), so he'll get to a more official 50 soon.  This one definitely falls in the lower half, just because it is so low-budget, and feels unremarkable.  That 90 minutes was a long 90 minutes, longer than it needed to be for something that could have been fun.

I should clarify here that the fact that it's low-budget alone isn't enough for me to dislike this.  I really enjoyed Clownado, and that probably had a lower budget than this.  But that one felt like everyone was more on the same page.  The other thing is, Todd Sheetz is a veteran director who knows how to manage that budget, whereas here we had two directors who had never done a full length film before.  It would be interesting to see what a Todd Sheetz, or another schlock auteur like Fred Olen Ray or Jim Wynorski could do with this; or Albert Pyun, a fellow member of the 40 Club with Dolph, I think he would've taken this script, made fun, compelling characters, and shot the thing in a way that, yes, we would've known it was still low-budget, but maybe that 90 minutes would've been more entertaining.

This movie also really borrows from Soldier Boyz, the Michael Dudikoff goof fest where he takes a group of juvenile delinquents into a war zone to help him on a mission.  The rag tag group of kids thing is always hard to sell, but I feel like in 2017 one would have to know it didn't work with Soldier Boyz in 1995, and maybe consider a different tract.  If they could've just made one character compelling enough to want to see them in a scene without Dolph, that would've helped.  Maybe make one of them a ninja.  Ninja's always help.  Or Sasquatch.  You could've replaced the whole rag tag group of kids with a ninja and Sasquatch, but played it straight, and it would've been a classic.

As I mentioned above, the zombie as a baddie can be difficult to work, but the genius of George A. Romero was that he made it look easy.  I think this movie though shows how hard it is.  How many times can our characters walk into a room, get attacked by zombies, kill them, and either almost get bitten, or have someone get bitten to thin out the cast?  Romero did other things, like used unique locations, created people we cared about, and set an overall tone that made the whole thing compelling.  I'm not saying I needed Dead Trigger to be that good, just a serviceable fun time, and it unfortunately couldn't even be that.

Time to wrap it up.  I think this is a good one for Dolph completists, but with so much else out there Dolph-wise, there are a lot of other ones to check out first.  It's a shame with such a great title and a nice, compact runtime.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5662550

Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's the Fantastic Four (2015)

I don't remember where I first found out about this, I think it was recommended on Amazon Prime, but I knew it was something I had to see.  Recently I had Mitch from The Video Vacuum on the podcast to discuss this film, in addition to the other DTV Marvel movies, and what the genre is like now with all the blockbusters.  You can check out that podcast on our Talk Shoe site, or by searching for us on iTunes.

Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's the Fantastic Four is a documentary that takes us behind the scenes of a movie that was finished, but never officially released, and now lives on in bootlegged versions.  It takes us back to a time when Marvel was hard-up for cash and sold the rights of their films to lesser entities like Cannon.  In this case, a producer had the rights to the Fantastic Four, and wanted to get it made quickly and on the cheap.  That's where Roger Corman came in, and the movie did get made; but before it could be released, it died on the vine, and before we knew it, FOX had the rights and the film was made on the big screen, and the rest was history.

I really enjoyed this.  I think as a comic book fan growing up in the 80s and 90s, this may have captured the feeling of that time better than any of the dramatic adaptations of any of the comics.  The interviews were compelling, the sense of expectation and what this movie could mean for everyone's careers, coupled with the misgivings they had around things like the budget and timeline they were working with, really took us behind the scenes in a way that, at least for me, put a lot of how all this works into a new perspective.  The idea that maybe this low-budget film was being used by Marvel to leverage FOX into a deal, or that perhaps the person who had the rights was using Corman to leverage Marvel to buy him off, and that ultimately it's the actors and crew--and to some extent us as fans--who suffer when the film is shelved and buried.  To my mind, we needed this movie and to hear what the people involved had to say, almost as much as the people involved needed to get their story out.

I have to confess, I haven't seen any of the bootlegged copies of the finished product that are floating around, but I would like to.  From what I've seen, I think it would be a great accompaniment to The Punisher, Captain America, and Nick Fury.  The fact that Marvel, under Disney, is trying to bury these DTV installments is a shame--and shortsighted.  While no one is clamoring for a special edition of the 2015 Fantastic Four reboot that barely covered its budget at the gate, a Shout Factory blu-ray with all the extras for the 1994 version would definitely be a hit--and would also gin up interest in a new incarnation if they ever wanted to try it on the big screen again.  The thing is, I don't know if the Fantastic Four is the kind of thing that can pull in $4 billion worldwide.  Maybe now that Disney has it (I think, right?), a Disney+ series with all the characters they have at their disposal would be way to go.

I don't know if I'd say Roger Corman's reputation takes a hit in this movie, but I don't know that he looks good either, and it was a bit of a disappointment to see that.  I'm going to get into Lloyd Kaufman's small part in this later, but it's almost like he predicted what was going to happen here.  At the very least, Corman lost control of this picture, and I think that's what happens when you take on someone else's property.  For us, the idea of The Fantastic Four being shot on the Carnosaur set is too amazing for words, but it sounds like when Stan Lee saw it, he crapped himself.  Anyway, the way the documentary paints it--or at least the impression I got--is that Corman was substantially compensated for the trouble he went to in producing this and subsequently allowing it to be buried, but he wasn't exactly forthright with the cast and crew about that.  If that's the case, I don't know if it takes some of the shine off Corman as a low-budget producer, but it does give us a more realistic understanding of the business he's in and the decisions he has to make.

One of the things Mitch and I discussed on the podcast was if there was a place for the DTV comic book movie in the modern blockbuster environment, and I think there is.  I don't know if the Fantastic Four is it, but I think with the way DTV and straight to streaming has become bigger and includes bigger names, there are a lot of Marvel and DC properties that would work in the modern DTV world.  Moon Knight is one I've brought up before, with Dolph Lundgren at the helm--though Scott Adkins would work too.  With all the DTV work Nicolas Cage has been doing, Ghost Rider seems to be another obvious one.  She-Hulk is one that hasn't been done yet, and while I wouldn't see a big screen market for her, a DTV film using a WWE star the way WWE has taken over DTV properties like The Marine sequels would work.  Winter Soldier is another that could be done well, especially in an Eastern European setting, where a lot of DTV films are shot.  Finally, what about some of the X products?  Maybe a Domino DTV flick that slots in between Deadpool sequels?  One thing that may hurt us with possible new DTV comic book flicks though is the success of The Joker.  A $55 million budget that was turned into over $1 billion worldwide at the gate might have studios thinking with the right story and talent, they don't need to spend $500 million and have to make $4 billion to be a success. 

Finally, I wanted to talk about Lloyd Kaufman's small part at the beginning of the film.  We find out that Kaufman and Troma were also approached for the Fantastic Four adaptation, and Kaufman turned it down.  His reasoning was, what's in it for us?  We have our own brand, and our own characters, I don't see the benefit in us trying to make a film for someone else with someone else's characters.  As I mentioned above, I wonder if he foresaw the trouble that Corman ended up having--at the very least, he knew he would be beholden to someone else creatively, and he didn't want that.  As much as Corman and the 1994 Fantastic Four that never happened get to the heart of what DTV films are all about, there are very few who embody the spirit more than Kaufman, and this appearance and his explanation on why he declined to work on this project really showed why he's so great.  Here's to you Mr. Kaufman, you're one of the good ones.

I can't recommend this enough.  If you have Prime, I would check it out, or even rent it if you need to, it's really worth it.  In terms of the podcast, that was also a great episode worth checking out.  Mitch and I did almost 2 hours on the subject of comic book movies, so if you're traveling for the holidays, load it up have it on in the background while you're on the road/in the air/ridin' that train, high on cocaine, etc.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3113456

Code Name: Wild Geese (1984)

When Will from The Exploding Helicopter podcast asked if I wanted to be a guest on his show, he suggested a few movies, and this was on the list.  As I had been looking to do more Antonio Margheriti, and get some more flicks with DTVC Hall of Famer Klaus Kinski, this seemed like the perfect choice.  As an aside, if you haven't been checking out the Exploding Helicopter site, and podcast, you really must--not to mention following him on Twitter, where he posts great gifs of some of the best exploding helicopters in cinema.

Code Name: Wild Geese has Lewis Collins as a guy who leads a rag-tag group of mercenaries in Asia.  USA DEA agent Ernest Borgnine contracts with Collins's crew to take out some heroin dealers in the Golden Triangle.  The problem is, they get all the way out there, blow up the drugs, only to have a henchman blow up their helicopter.  Not only that, but they discover another drug depot.  Now they need to destroy the second one, survive, and get home.  Oh, and there's also Klaus Kinski, he's never up to any good.

I had fun with this.  It wasn't the greatest, the characters weren't well developed, especially the star, Lewis Collins, whom I thought they could've done more with.  Also, despite having a consistent action quotient, it did get repetitive at times--how many times can you see guys being shot and falling from high up, or shimmying to death as they get sprayed with gunfire?  On the other hand, Margheriti's model-work was fantastic, including a great car chase, a train explosion, and blowing up buildings that he rendered from the actual structures they were shooting--in fact, this was so well-done, it took Will telling me they were models for me to catch it.  I also enjoyed Kinski, Borgnine, and Lee Van Cleef, who played the helicopter pilot.  I think you could do a lot worse for a low-budget military jungle actioner.

When I did the pod, I talked about a kind of Chekhov's Gun theory I have with Klaus Kinski: if you have Kinski in your movie, he has to eventually be a baddie, and that's what happened here.  It's not the Kinski on 10 that we love though.  He's kind of subdued, wearing jumpsuits, chewing up scenery.  Also, he's dubbed, I guess because his lines were in German in the original, and that tempers some of his punch as an actor.  I think as a Kinski enthusiast, it was fun to see him here, but it wasn't the full-on Kinski we love.

I wasn't familiar with Lewis Collins before doing the Exploding Helicopter pod, but Will being from England, knew all about him.  His show, The Professionals, didn't air here in the States, but I discovered in reading up on him on imdb, that he was up for the role of James Bond, I guess at the time Timothy Dalton got it.  After seeing Lewis Collins in this, I think he would've made a great Bond--or at least an interesting one.  I think Margheriti tried to tap into that here, combining a bit of international man of intrigue with grizzled war leader.  Again, like a lot of the character development, it was uneven, so we never got a full sense of either.

Anytime we get an Oscar winner on the DTVC it's great.  Usually it's Nicolas Cage or Cuba Gooding Jr., but Ernest Borgnine is another winner with a strong DTV CV.  One of the things I liked best about this was seeing his scenes with Kinski.  We know Kinski was very anti-Hollywood, and the Oscar is the greatest honor Hollywood can bestow on an actor, so I got the sense in watching him with Borgnine that he was like "Oscar huh?  I'm not impressed."  Borgnine for his credit was doing his thing, and even opposite Kinski there was a sense that he could care less and felt like he had nothing to prove.  One thing I appreciate about both actors is they treat acting like a profession, and if the money is right, they'll take the job and do their work.

Finally, because I was a guest on the Exploding Helicopter podcast for this film, I feel it's necessary to discuss the exploding helicopter action.  As I told Will, what impressed me here was how the exploding helicopter was integral to the plot.  Usually the exploding helicopter is a quick and easy way to infuse action into a film, but beyond possibly killing off a baddie in the denouement, it doesn't have any impact one way or the other on how the story unfolds.  When I think of movie tropes, the exploding helicopter is up there with damsels in distress and car chases as one of the most prevalent, but unlike those other two, for me it's the one that's tacked on the most, so to see it have that kind of impact on the characters was refreshing for me.

I found this on Prime, and thought it was a fun time.  It's not the greatest, but not the worst way to spend 90 minutes.  Thank you again to Will for having me on the Exploding Helicopter pod, and for everyone who hasn't checked out yet, definitely do.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087068

Rumble (2018)

We've been back for almost 3 months now, and this is the first time we've got Gary Daniels up here.  Not sure why it's taken us this long, but we're here now and ready to make up for lost time.  Let's see how this one turned out.

Rumble has Gary Daniels as a former MMA champ whose girlfriend is into a pimp for money, so he needs to keep fighting to make the money back.  While in Mexico for a fight, his girlfriend is kidnapped, and the man holding her is a mysterious cartel leader who forces Daniels to fight in order to get her back.  Will Gary be able to figure out who is holding his girlfriend in time to save them both?

I'm not sure where to go with this one.  This is meant to be a different kind of Gary Daniels movie, up to the point it isn't, and I think that identity crisis is its ultimate undoing.  At times it's trying to be your traditional Daniels actioner, like when he's taking out three guys who are chasing him at once.  But then you have non-Daniels elements, like how it tries to be this Hitchcockian-Usual Suspects suspense thriller, where we don't know who is after Daniels and what he ultimately wants, but we think it could be any of the people Daniels has been in contact with to this point.  The biggest issue for me though was just how many times Daniels's character got his ass kicked.  Like, at the end, when he wins a fight, I'm like "oh yeah, that's right, he can do that."  Maybe that's the key complaint with this film: they spend so much time diminishing Daniels's abilities as a hero, that when he finally shows he can prevail, it actually stretches credulity.

Definitely not what we want from a Daniels action flick.  There are times when his character is getting his ass kicked, and I'm like "I can't watch this happen."  Daniels was the fight choreographer, and maybe that was the thing, he didn't want to choreograph wins for himself in all his fights, and I get that, but I also feel like he has to understand the reputation he's built with his fans.  Cold Harvest, Recoil, Bloodmoon, among many others, showcased a top notch athlete with supreme skills, and while maybe that's not the movie that's being made here, or that Daniels wanted to choreograph for his character's role, there's a certain expectation when his name's on the marquee, and his fans want something that meets that expectation.  Right away, we find out his character is on the run from a pimp.  Gary Daniels is playing a character on the run from a pimp?  The pimp and his henchmen are the intro fodder in a usual Daniels flick, he doesn't run from them, he warms up on them.  I get that this movie is supposed to be viewed separate from the rest of Daniels's flicks, but there should also be an understanding of what expectations seeing Daniels's name on the box evokes from fans like me.

This was directed by R. Ellis Frazier, who did another Daniels flick we've reviewed here, Across the Line, and from what I've seen of his filmography, he does a lot of these DTV flicks shot in Mexico, many of which were written by this film's screenwriter, Benjamin Budd.  This is one of those ones where I would've liked to have had it on DVD and been able to listen to their commentary, if they had it, to see what they were going for in certain spots, especially the unevenness in Daniels character between when he couldn't take down anyone, and when he could beat up the same guys who were kicking his ass earlier.  I get why they would cast Daniels in this role, because he could fight, so playing an MMA champion wouldn't be much of a stretch; but going from having him take down three fake police officers at once, then not being able to beat up a pimp's hatchet man, made it hard to understand what his character's abilities were, especially when we're used to Daniels being more of the former than the latter.  There are a bunch of other Ellis/Budd collaborations listed on imdb, including two on my radar, Misfire with Daniels, and Larceny with Dolph Lundgren.  It'll be interesting to see how either of those go.

Getting back to Daniels, this is his 44th tag here, putting him behind only Dolph Lundgren's 49 (one of which was for the Van Damme Film Fest on the 400th post); and with Albert Pyun's 41, puts him in exclusive company in the 40+ club.  He's been a workhorse for just over three decades, giving us such classics as Bloodmoon, Cold Harvest, and Recoil, and while he also does a lot of small parts in films with bigger stars, he's carried enough as the lead that I think he's put in his work.  I also think too that he's earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to a movie like this that may have been too ambitious and missed its mark for me.  With 40+ and counting, we still have a ways to go to get caught up on the rest of his films, so it'll be interesting to see how some of those went as well.

The Hitchcockian element was something that, at least I appreciated the effort on, but by the same token, it begs the question: who are you making this film for?  Most film fans picking this up when they see Gary Daniels on the tin want this badass here.  Maybe the better Hitchcockian thriller would have been him losing his girlfriend under mysterious circumstances, but he needs to find out what happened by investigating, as opposed to getting his ass kicked for two-thirds of the film.  Goes to a bar to interrogate people, bar fight ensues, bar's destroyed, but Daniels gets his answers.  Goes to an outdoor market, chase, then fight ensues, local business people eking out a meager existence have their products destroyed, but Daniels gets his answers.  See where this is going?  There's a right way and a wrong way to make a good Gary Daniels film, and it doesn't have to be the in-your-face mile-a-minute action of a PM Entertainment flick either.  Us action fans don't ask for much, but if you give us what we want, we're loyal and grateful.

And on that note, time to wrap this up.  The bonus here is it is Daniels-centric, and he has some good fights which he himself choreographed.  But I think it's hard to split the baby with what this was going for, and the fact that Daniels's character got his ass kicked so much it made it tough to watch in spots.  I don't think this touches his best stuff, but I do appreciate that this wasn't one of his others where he's taking a backseat to other actors, and hopefully we'll at least get more of him in this capacity.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3991302

T-Force (1994)

This was the feature film on a recent episode of the Exploding Helicopter podcast (which if you haven't checked it out yet, you should!), and my first thought was "let me check out my review on it."  Turned out I didn't have a review for it yet, because it was one I had watched and planned to review before the unplanned hiatus.  I guess now is as good a time as any to take care of that.  In addition to being featured on the Exploding Helicopter podcast, our friends Ty and Brett reviewed this over at their site, Comeuppancereviews.net.

T-Force takes place in the near future, and in that time robots are prevalent.  The newest creation: robot cops.  After terrorists led by Vernon Wells take over a building, and the robot cops swoop in and take out a bunch of innocent bystanders at the same time they take out Wells and his men, a decision is made to scrap them altogether.  The problem is, they have a sense of self, and don't wanna die.  Jack Scalia and one of the robot cops who didn't join his robot friends are all that stand in their way.  The robots' way I mean, not Scalia and the other robot...

This is the real deal PM Entertainment.  That Vernon Wells building takeover happens right away, so they don't waste any time with the good action--I think they blow up a helicopter in the first 15-20 minutes.  It's classic PM in the sense that, just when you think the plot may get in the way of the action, they hit us with a too-sweet action sequence to keep us happy.  The only complaint, and I don't know if you call this a complaint, is I felt it suffered from the Destro Effect, in that for me, Evan Lurie as the head robot baddie was way cooler and more likable than our "hero" Jack Scalia.  That's because Scalia's character was essentially a racist.  Between the fact that Lurie is already cooler than Scalia, and then Scalia's character is hard to root for because he's a racist, you end up needing Lurie to kill so many innocent people to make him more unlikable than Scalia, and I don't know if the movie quite gets there.  But Destro Effect aside, this is good PM Entertainment doing its job for you.

Out of all the great DTV action stars, I think I missed Evan Lurie the most during my hiatus.  Unlike people like Dolph, who I might encounter in a non-DTV context, I'm only seeing Evan Lurie in flicks like this.  The reality with this movie is, he shouldn't have been the baddie, he and his partners Malibu and Jennifer MacDonald should have been the heroes, roaming the LA area, blowing up stuff and making cool faces.  I mean, that's essentially what PM gave us with this, it was just, knowing they were the baddies, we understood it all would have to come to a bad end Lurie and his crew eventually.  Here's to you Evan Lurie, you're one of the great ones.

I think this is the first Jack Scalia film we've done here at the DTVC, which is surprising considering he's been in a lot of PM Entertainment flicks.  As I mentioned above, his character was a tough one to root for.  Again, he's already working uphill because he's not as cool as Lurie; but then they make his character a racist against robots.  He changes his tune after he works with the robot in Lurie's crew who doesn't go rogue, but why did he need that to not be a racist?  It's like when there's an incident of violence against women in the spotlight, and some guy will say "I have two daughters, so I think this is horrible."  Why do you need to have a daughter to think violence against women is bad?  And why do you need to be partnered with a robot to think not all robots are bad?

This movie had two messages that it was trying to convey.  One, the nature of self, what makes us human, and furthermore, what gives us the right to stake our claim to life on this planet.  If we create robots, can we just shut them down when we want, or do the robots have a say?  You could also say this about animals we slaughter for food, right?  We breed the pig, but the pig doesn't want to die when it's time any more than Evan Lurie did.  The difference of course, is that the pig can't blow us up.  The second message had to do with immigration and the idea of immigrants coming to America and taking jobs away from blue collar workers.  The problem with that is, they never quite resolved Scalia's mindset on that, rather just had him forget it when he befriended his robot partner.  What's interesting about both of these debates is how they've evolved 25 years later.  In terms of the nature of self and who has the right to live, the plant-based protein market is huge now, but not because people think pigs are sentient creatures, but rather because environmentally factory farming is killing us.  As far as the immigration issue, that has blown up worse than we could have imagined in 1994, with the way Trump revived it as a boogie man and rode that hysteria among white, working class voters to the 2016 election.  That might be why Scalia's character is so hard to root for today: we can see him in his MAGA hat now, and that makes him all the more gross.

Usually that previous paragraph is the one I use for the seventh one, but I couldn't end a PM Entertainment post on that note.  Seeing this again after seeing so many newer DTV flicks for the blog recently, I'm reminded of why I got into this in the first place.  PM Entertainment got it right more often than they got it wrong, and this is a prime example.  How easily could they have gotten too bogged down in the two themes I mentioned above?  But not only did they not let that happen, they had some real kick-ass scenes.  When we see that logo at the beginning of a movie, we know we're going to be in pretty good shape.  Just a smooth-talking Evan Lurie robot in a ponytail blowing up helicopters.  What more can you want?

This is the PM Entertainment you came for.  Sweet action, fun baddies with Lurie and Malibu, and plenty of schlock to go around.  As of right now, this is available to screen on YouTube, so I would check it out if you haven't already.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111345/

Showdown in Manila (2016)

Getting back into things after that long hiatus, I wanted to see what some of the Hall of Famers have been up to, and this one has three: Cynthia Rothrock, Don "The Dragon" Wilson, and Olivier Gruner.  In addition, it has DTVC favorites Casper Van Dien, Mark Dacascos, Tia Carrere, Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa, and Matthias Hues.  I couldn't not review this, right?

Showdown in Manila is about a cop, Alexander Nevsky, who gets his team killed when a bust goes bad.  He starts a PI firm with former LA cop Casper Van Dien, and gets a case dumped in his lap that may get him the revenge on the baddies, Cary Tagawa and Matthias Hues, who killed his team, when Tia Carrere hires them to find the same men who killed her husband, Mark Dacascos.  If Nevsky and Van Dien are going to pull this off, they'll need to call in some DTVC Hall of Famers.

This one was missing something, and I think the problem was there was too much shooting and too little anything else.  And it was that kind of shooting where you see one person firing a weapon in one shot, and then someone else in an entirely different shot getting hit.  The other thing is, when you have the names this had, you need more than just one Mark Dacascos fight and one Cynthia Rothrock fight for that to pay off.  I don't need Olivier Gruner and Don "The Dragon" Wilson to just fire weapons, anyone can do that, I need to see them take out a few guys at once with their martial arts.  I feel bad, because I think I'm judging the movie more on what it could have been as opposed to what it was based on the cast, but the trailer was selling me that too, and in my mind it just didn't quite deliver.

Another issue the film had was, it really was supposed to be Nevsky's, but Casper Van Dien was stealing every scene they were in together.  It made me want more of him, and the scenes that were Nevsky-focused had me waiting for when Van Dien would be back.  Then, as Van Dien is shining in every scene the way he was, I starting thinking "why isn't his character the one this is centered around?  He's more compelling."  That's a situation you never want to be in.  If you look at another "showdown" movie, Showdown in Little Tokyo, Brandon Lee was fantastic, but Dolph could carry it so well that they played off each other and the whole thing worked.  The other thing is I think Dolph had had more acting credits at that point than Brandon Lee, whereas Casper Van Dien has been around much more than Nevsky, and it showed in their scenes together.

Alexander Nevsky has made a few films over the past five years, and I think he could, with the right material, be one of those actors after Scott Adkins and Michael Jai White who could carry the torch after some of the old guard have retired--and to some extent, I think this movie was a bit of a passing of the torch with the names who were supporting him.  The problem Nevsky faces was staring at him in the person of Matthias Hues: the bad guy is usually the hulking Eastern European, and a lot of the stars working with him in this picture made their money taking down their share of Alexander Nevskys in their careers.  What that means is he's working uphill versus the high-octane martial arts of Adkins and White that make more sense to us as action fans.  I would add a Tony Jaa to that list.  I'm not saying I don't think Nevsky can have a career in DTV action, I personally would love to see him make it, I just think he needs the right material as he gets his feet under him, and I don't know that this film was it.

As we discussed, there are three DTVC Hall of Famers, and all three of them come in for the jungle scenes in the last half-hour or so.  Part of the reason why all three of them are Hall of Famers is we're used to them leading their own films--Gruner has 20 films on the DTVC, Rothrock 28, and Wilson 30.  You could also add Dacascos and his 16 films to that list, but seeing that he was also directing, his smaller role was more understandable.  The point I'm making is, adding headliners to this movie without giving them headliner roles I think brings us back to the idea that this film feels like it could have been more.  For example, Cynthia Rotherock had a good fight scene where she took out a bunch of henchmen, but that's the kind of scene an up-and-comer should get to show us what she's got, not someone who has helmed 5 DTV action franchises: China O'Brien, Rage and Honor, Martial Law, Lady Dragon, and Tiger Claws.  She's one of the biggest reasons why I got into DTV action, and to see her in this small role supporting Nevsky didn't feel right.  Same could be said of Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Olivier Gruner.  We may see more of this kind of thing going forward, where DTVC Hall of Famers take smaller supporting roles, and I don't know how we mitigate this issue of how much we're used to them being the lead, unless you only have them be baddies.  I'm not saying I need them in roles where they do a fight scene every 10-15 minutes--they've already done plenty of those for us, and plenty of great ones at that--, but I think you have to give the audience something they can really sink their teeth into so they leave feeling satisfied.

*****SPOILER ALERT*****SPOILER ALERT*****SPOILER ALERT*****
I wanted to discuss the very end of the movie, so if you don't want to know what happens, don't read this paragraph.  The way the film ends, the guys capture Tagawa, and take him back to Manila, where Matthias Hues has been lying in the trunk of their car.  They have the guys in handcuffs sitting in chairs in their office, when Tia Carrere's character comes in, and shoots them both in cold blood.  I don't want to get into the idea of victim's rights in real life, and whether or not a victim's family should have the right to get revenge like this.  Real life is one thing, but a movie is different, and it seems off when the heroes do it.  Again, this isn't real life, Mark Dacascos didn't really die, so in the construct of a movie, I think you have to have the baddie go for a gun or do something threatening to justify killing them.  They can't be restrained and defenseless, it just doesn't play well, at least to me.
*****END SPOILER*****END SPOILER*****END SPOILER*****

For me, I unfortunately can't fully recommend this.  It had its moments, but I feel like the bigger cast made me wish they had done more.  I like Nevsky, and think he could have a big future, but there were a lot of names that overshadowed him.  In fact, many of the big names made their careers in films where they defeated Nevsky-types, and I think that undermined what they were going for.  You can find this on Amazon Prime, so if you're a Prime subscriber, this won't cost you anything more.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4586626

The Debt Collector (2018)

It was about time we got some Scott Adkins up on the blog now that we're back, and he certainly has a lot to choose from.  I saw that this one has a sequel in post production, so I figured it would be the one to do.  Let's see how it went.

The Debt Collector has Adkins as a guy who runs a dojo that is short on funds.  His buddy, Michael Paré, gets him a job as a debt collector for an organized crime boss.  For orientation, he shadows one of the Mandylor brothers, Louis.  Things get crazy though when they take a job from Tony Todd that may not be what it seems.  Can the guys do the right thing, or will they carry out their job no matter what?

I don't know what to think of this one.  It had action, but was it the best action?  It had a nice 95-minute runtime, and I don't know that it moved slowly, but the earlier construct of the guys just doing jobs felt a little repetitive.  How many times do I need to see them go to collect money, Scott Adkins get thrown through a wall, then win the fight and the guys get the cash, before I get the idea?  I think the movie understood that too, because at the point where I might have said "this movie is just spinning its wheels," they interject the Tony Todd element into the story.  The problem was, beyond the dilemma the characters had in whether or not they go against orders, they were really just going from going place to place to collect money, to going place to place to get information.  I don't know how you mitigate that, other than maybe having less of that construct, moving up the dilemma to earlier in the story, and then changing the paradigm to something that's more cat-and-mouse or two guys trying to stay alive and clear their names.

This movie got Scott Adkins half-right.  The half they got right was keeping his native English accent, and not forcing him to affect an American one.  I know for me, I would rather have Scott Adkins as a Brit living in LA with no explanation on how he got there, than him affecting an American accent.  The half they got wrong was in the fight scenes.  They were too knock-down-drag-em-out, which to me wastes what makes Adkins so great: full-throttle martial arts action.  I want lightning fast kicks and chops, taking out three guys at a time, maybe throwing in a few jump kicks; not trading punch with big guys who pick him up and throw him through plaster walls before Louis Mandylor swoops in and smashes a vase on the big guy's head.  This might be the first Adkins movie I've seen where his non-fight scenes outshone the ones where he fought.

As I mentioned above, this has one of the Mandylor brothers, Louis, as the old veteran debt collector showing Adkins the ropes.  I would say between the two of them, he may have made more sense in this than Adkins.  I think you could have made a compelling, mid-to-late 90s independent flick about a debt collector with a tough past who found his way into this sordid life and now is trying to cope.  Dial down the action a bit, add in some quirky supporting characters, and we could have had something really compelling.  I think that might have been another problem, this movie didn't know what it wanted to be, hard-hitting action flick or 90s throwback indie character study, and I think if it had picked one or the other and stuck with it, we could have something really great.

Tony Todd's character felt like another miss, as it really could have been that offbeat yet very evil organized crime boss that a lot of 90s indie flicks, especially post-Pulp Fiction, featured.  The way that whole plot  comes into the film, with his character wanting them to track someone down, it didn't feel fully fleshed out, almost like it was there to mitigate that issue I described where the paradigm of them going to collect money started spinning its wheels.  I wonder if the better way wasn't to mix some of those earlier debt collections into a montage, then have this Tony Todd thing be a bigger part.  Again, it was just something about the film that felt like it didn't know what it wanted to be.

Michael Paré is looking to outdo Eric Roberts for most movies coming out.  If you look at his imdb, he's been doing like 4 or 5 movies a year for over a decade now, and he's not showing any signs of slowing up.  I remember imdb used to have this thing where you could look at two actors and see how many times they've worked together.  It would be interesting to see how many times Paré has been with Roberts.  I think those two would make for a great buddy cop movie, the problem is, neither of them would have time to be the leads if they're appearing in five other movies each a year.

I think you could have some fun with this one.  For me, it just felt like it had too much that wasn't fully fleshed out, plus, I personally prefer high-octane martial arts action as opposed to "I hit you, you hit me, then throw me through a wall, and then my partner will smash a vase over your head" kind of action.  At the very least, Scott Adkins keeps his natural accent, which for me is always a plus.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7448180