The Adventures of Taura: Prison Ship Star Slammer aka Star Slammer (1986)

Back in April I did a film called Galaxy Warriors for my indie review, and I watched this then as a means of comparison. Considering it was directed by DTVC Hall of Famer Fred Olen Ray, and has DTVC favorite Ross Hagen in it, I figured it needed a review as well.

Star Slammer has Sandy Brooke as Taura, a woman living on a planet somewhere in outer space, having a pretty nice life, until Ross Hagen and Dukey Flyswatter show up with some other baddies and cause trouble. They're there as representatives of a galactic empire, which means when Taura takes the henchmen out and burns Hagen's hand in the process, she's sent to a space prison run by a lesbian dominatrix, Warden Exene (Marya Gant), and her lackey Muffin (Dawn Wildsmith). She's tossed in a cell block with some rough characters, led by Mikey (Suzy Stokey), who give her a hard time at first, but after she saves Mikey's life from a large monster, they team up to take everyone out. At the same time Hagen and Flyswatter show up to inspect the prison, so Taura can get her revenge on them too. Sometimes everything just works out.

This is the fun time you want from a movie like this. It plays on all the exploitation notes you'd expect, from women in bondage, to lady-on-lady action, to women in various stages of undress, but it also has a lot of enjoyable elements that go beyond that. Sandy Brooke is a fun lead who brings you back to actors like Pam Grier and Margaret Markhov, and Suzy Stokey is great as the antagonist that Brooke wins over. Also I enjoyed Gant as the warden, she played that part to a T, but she also brought in some "women dealing with men in the workplace" elements that I wasn't expecting which were funny too. For some reason these movies often have a warden and a lackey, and Dawn Wildsmith was great in that lackey role too, being creepy and villainous. And then you have Ross Hagen and Dukey Flyswatter, aka Michael Sonye, who were fantastic. I love seeing them in anything, but they were particularly fun here. This just works on a lot of levels and will get you to the church on time.

Unlike Galaxy Warriors, which tried to make an Impossible Burger version of this type of film by removing the women in bondage and girl-on-girl exploitative aspects, this film leaned into them fully. That's not why it worked better though, I think an Impossible Burger version is still possible to make right. This worked because it had some really fun performances, the jokes landed better, and the effects were more realistic. I looked, and IMDb said this had a budget of $200,000, which is a lot more than Galaxy Warriors probably had, but it's not like this had a lot either--and I imagine a lot of that $200,000 went to the cast. So how does a Galaxy Warriors pull something like this off then? I think that's where Fred Olen Ray comes in. The sense of humor, the relationships with cast and crew, the experience to get things done quick and on the cheap, it's all there. We can poke fun at these all we want--and the volume with which Ray makes these means they aren't all hits--but there's a talent there to make these work at the level they do beyond the T-n'-A, and we can see it here. For anyone trying to make an Impossible Burger version of this, study the other things Ray does well here and try to replicate them.

Part of the strength of a movie like this is a great lead. With the 70s Corman films it was Pam Grier, who was maybe the best to ever do it. Sandy Brooke is great here too. She mixes the fun with the serious, all while getting groped and wearing a ripped tank-top without a bra underneath. Looking at her IMDb bio, she only has 11 credits, and many of them are much smaller parts than this. It's possible most of the parts she was offered after were like this one, which may not be as much fun to play, even if she was great at it. That's an area where the Impossible Burger version has an advantage, the star isn't put through the ringer as much, but in the 80s there wasn't an Impossible Burger version of anything--veggie burgers were something different from an actual burger, and no one considered that anything could approximate the real thing, all while cattle farming was being consolidated under Reagan's deregulation policies into the factory farms we have today, so at the same time that plant-based burgers were getting better, the inhumanely factory-raised beef we started getting was tasting worse. Is that another thing to consider? That the DTV market is just as assembly-line now that the quality of the films is such that an Impossible Burger version doesn't look so bad? But also, while a Sandy Brooke would only have had the real version of this kind of movie to make in the 80s, could we see more actresses like her take on these roles in a new Impossible Burger version? That might be the kind of thing that punches the Impossible Burger version up.

The other thing of course was having Ross Hagen and Dukey Flyswatter. Look at how great they look down there. The outfits alone were fantastic, but then you throw in their performances. Back in May of 2022 I had Kevin Vonesper on the podcast to talk about the documentary he was putting together, The Life and Slimes of Dukey Flyswatter and Haunted Garage, which is still in production as we speak, but hopefully will be out soon. That's episode 98 in the archives if you want to check it out, but he gave us a lot of great info on Flyswatter. Then we have the Ross Hagen, who's now on 8 films on the site. I don't know if the Hall of Fame is in his future, mostly because we don't see him as often on here, but between his performances in this film and Action USA, he's gotta be close. There's an inspired element here with Flyswatter and Hagen, they're bringing an energy to the proceedings that the film needed, and I think for people looking to make movies like this today, find people who can give you this--and if they're a bit more of a known commodity, pay for that one day of shooting to get this out of them--though if you can't, just come up with the outfits. Hagen's was probably recycled from another film, but how hard would Flyswatter's 80s suit and hair be to pull off?

Finally, we're at 16 director credits for Fred Olen Ray on the site. That puts him three up on Sam Firstenberg for second-most all-time as a director, but 27 behind Albert Pyun. The thing is, Ray has the CV, even if most of his output now is Christmas movies, I think I could count off 27 movies in the 80s and 90s that he's done that would be perfect for the site, but when will I get them done? I realized the last film of his I did was his Hall of Fame induction post back in October of 2020. That's way too long to go, but how much more frequently could I get to? One every three or four months? Call that four a year, so in 7 years we could be there? I'm not saying Pyun's director record is like Cy Young's career win total of 511 games, which will never be touched with the current five-man rotation in baseball where pitchers barely get 30 games a season, but it's kind of close to that when you consider how my cutting back to one review a week is similar to the baseball five-man rotation. When guys like Dolph, Camacho, Pyun, Daniels, Rothrock, etc. were racking up big numbers, I was doing upwards of three posts a week. There was a lot of tagging to be had at that time, just like when Cy Young pitched, pitchers pitched much more often, so there were a lot of wins to be had. So if we call Dolph the Babe Ruth of DTV action stars, is Pyun the Cy Young of DTV directors? Maybe?

Before I bore you with too many baseball analogies--especially for our readers outside the States who have no idea about baseball--let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this on Tubi in America. That's a great way to make it happen, grab some pizzas and some beverages and put this on a Saturday movie night with one or two other movies, and you'll be all set.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087945

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Nine Deaths of the Ninja (1985)

Last month Chris from Bulletproof Action asked if I'd like to be a part of the Sho Kosugi collaboration post he was putting together for Mr. Kosugi's birthday, and of course I was in; but I realized in looking at the films he wanted us to rank, I hadn't seen this one yet. A major oversight on my part, but now that I have I figured I'd review it myself. In addition to us and Chris at Bulletproof, this has also been covered by the guys at Comeuppance, Kenner at Movies in the Attic, Mitch at the Video Vacuum, and Karl at Fist of the B-List. You can see how late to the party I am.

Nine Deaths of the Ninja has our hero Mr. Kosugi, as Spike Shinobi who, along with Brent Huff and Emilia Crow, are part of an elite anti-terrorist team. When a be-wheel-chaired former Nazi (Blackie Dammett) enlists a gang of women commandos led by a woman named Honey Hump (Regina Richardson) to hijack a tour group in the Philippines, former tennis pro Vijay Amritraj calls our team in as quickly as possible to take them down. But it's a race against time, as the baddie has a lot of hostages--including Kosugi's real-life kids, Shane and Kane--and he isn't afraid to kill them.

This is the fun ninja action that I'm looking for from something like this. Sure, we could've used more actual "ninja action," but between how much bonkers stuff is going on, and the solid 80s action quotient, it does what I need. Where do I start? Maybe the opening credits where Kosugi is demonstrating his martial arts techniques while scantily clad women are doing an interpretive dance routine around him. Or when the baddies first hijack the tour bus, and later that evening one of the grunts attempts to rape the tour guide, so a young Kane Kosugi runs up behind him and sets his blue undies ablaze, sending the guy running down the aisle while sparks appear to be shooting out of his buttocks through the underwear. Also, that tour guide's character name is listed as "tour guide." You've got Huff and Kosugi doing some kind of undercover work that doesn't always make sense, but somehow it gets them to where the baddies are. And then the head baddie himself, Blackie Dammett's Nazi in a wheelchair with a monkey in a diaper as a companion, only to be outdone by Regina Richardson as Honey Hump. So we have this fun ridiculousness, but at the same time, we have some great action sequences, like Kosugi undercover as an elderly gentleman doing some Old Man Fu while Huff is trying to hook up with a young lady that works for Amritraj; or the end scenes, which were fantastic. This is just a fun time all around.

We're at 8 Kosugi films on the site, but looking at his bio, there isn't much else after this. He did an 80s set in the 50s teen sex romp called Aloha Summer that's on YouTube that we could do, but that's about it. And I don't know that it matters. Sure, we'd love to have more Kosugi, but these 80s ninja actioners are so great in themselves that they have an outsized influence on the entire DTV action world beyond what another DTV star with only that many credits would've had. And while this may not quite touch the heights of his best ones, it delivers what you want, and in some ways because it's so much fun compared to some of his darker ones--I'm looking at you Pray for Death--it has a bit of an edge on those for me. His last film was 2009's Ninja Assassin, so if this is it for him, we really only have those 80s ninja films as his legacy, but what a legacy it is. Whenever I see one of those engagement-farm-y "name an actor who had a better run than..." posts on Twitter, I think for me I'd take the Pepsi Challenge with Kosugi's 80s ninja stuff against anyone else.

One interesting twist in this was Emilia Crow's character (credited as Emilia Lesniak). While Kosugi and Huff were more out in the field, she was the computer whiz, communications expert, and the person with all the intel that helps us with background on characters through plot exposition. Usually that part is reserved for a geekier looking guy, but I thought she did really well with it. There was also a sense that she had some sexual tension with both Huff and Kosugi, like we couldn't tell if she was jealous Huff was going on a date with the other woman, or if she didn't care because she wanted to hook up with Kosugi, or if she didn't care because she didn't want to hook up with either of them. Had this been an 80s TV show, they could've played on those interactions much more. What a cool idea for an 80s TV show, these three traveling the globe, taking out terrorists and other assorted baddies, with some Diane-and-Sam-style will-they-or-won't-they screwball comedy notes. It's kind of a reverse Three Kinds of Heat, but also a major missed opportunity.

Among the other names, this is Kane Kosugi's 8th film on the site, same as his father. When we think of someone paying their dues to get into the biz, Kosugi has to be up there, because he was playing hostages and kidnap victims quite a bit when he was younger. His collaborations with Kaos will probably get his tag count above his father's, especially with Kaos having something in post-production that also has DTVC Hall of Famer Peter Weller in it. This is also 8 films for Brent Huff--I found out as I was posting this that I forgot to tag him for 1997's The Bad Pack--which I also don't even remember reviewing! This was only a few years before Strike Commando 2, and while he spent much of the 80s and 90s in the DTV world, he's carved out a nice career for himself in modern TV, which is good to see. Then we had former tennis pro Vijay Amritraj, who from 1983 to 1986 did Octopussy, this, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Talk about your three-picture run, it doesn't get much better than that. Finally Blackie Dammett, who plays the main baddie, has been on here one other time, in the Wings Hauser-Sybil Danning thriller LA Bounty, which is easily one of the greatest films we've reviewed on site.

Finally, with only the one paragraph left, I wanted to mention Lisa Friedman as Tour Guide. According to IMDb, she only did two other films, the 1980 Woody Allen film Stardust Memories, where she played "Fan in the Lobby;" and the 1981 car race thriller King of the Mountain, where she played "Spandex Girl." "Tour Guide" is definitely a step up from those two, but considering what the role entailed, I feel like she deserved better--like maybe a name? She starts out just being a tour guide, as her name suggests, but when the bus is taken hostage, later in the evening there's the assault, where this gross guy puts tape over her mouth while she's sleeping, then drags her to the back of the bus to have his way with her, only to fortunately have Kane Kosugi save the day. Later that same baddie decides he's going to have his way with her again, so he takes her behind some rocks, where fortunately our heroes step in this time to save her. It's definitely great that she was saved both times--we've seen darker versions of movies like these think it's necessary to go all the way--but just the fact that she was put through the ringer like that tells me she deserves better than just "Tour Guide" for her character name. Here's to you Lisa Friedman, you were a trooper.

And with that let's wrap this up. You can get this on YouTube or Plex here in the States. YouTube might actually be better because the version isn't bad, and Plex is horrible with commercials. This is a fun, lighter Kosugi film, which I appreciated. It's also a bit on the bonkers side, which may work in its favor. Also don't forget to check out the Ranked Kosugi list on Bulletproof Action! It was a lot of fun, and I was glad I was able to contribute.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089689

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Enemy Gold (1993)

In our continuing quest to get all of Sidaris's LETHAL Ladies films on the site, we come to this one, the first of the post-Dona Speir entries. "Bullets, Bombs and Babes," does it get any better? I'm not sure, but the person who made the poster wasn't a fan of the Oxford Comma. Are "bullets," "bombs," and "babes" all separate, or do the "bombs" and "babes" come as a package?

Enemy Gold is a reset of the LETHAL Ladies films. No Dona Speir, no Cynthia Brimhall, and no Abilene that can't shoot straight. We do have Penhall back, this time in Dallas with Mark Barriere (who had a small part in Fit to Kill) and Suzi Simpson, trying to take down drug kingpin Rodrigo Obregon. The problem is, a crooked member of the agency is standing in their way, and gets them suspended. As you can imagine, this isn't enough for Obregon, so he calls in assassin Jewel Panther (Julie Strain) and they go into the woods of Louisiana where our trio is camping out. At the same time, our trio thinks they may have found some long lost Confederate soldier gold. They're all on a collision course to wackiness.

This is an interesting entry in the series. It has everything you want, plenty of bullets, bombs, and babes, but I think as a kind of reboot or refresh of the series, this newer iteration hits its stride more with Dallas Connection, mostly because Julie K. Smith gives it the energy it needed. We also don't get quite as much Strain as we'd want, but what we get is great. I do like too that it was trying to move this series in a new direction, that Fit to Kill was the end of something, and almost right away we know we're experiencing something new from the Dallas landscape instead of Hawai'i, and Mark Barriere shoots and hits his target when he and Penhall are raiding the drug operation--Penhall even tells him "nice shot." No more Abilene who can't shoot straight here. This also wasn't directed by Andy Sidaris, his son Christian takes over, but he only directs this one and Dallas Connection before Andy steps back in. I don't know that that gives this a different feel though, Christian seems to maintain his father's vision of how these things should look. There are plenty of B n' B sex scenes ("boobs n' butt"), plenty of explosions, and plenty of scenes of women changing. This may not be the best of the LETHAL Ladies films, but it's still a really fun time.

This is now 8 films for Julie Strain on the site, which doesn't sound like many, but 8 puts her in a three-way tie for second-most all time by a woman on the site with Shannon Tweed and Kathleen Kinmont, which is 34 behind Cynthia Rothrock for the most all-time. Her first appearance in the film is her driving a convertible with her hair all over the place, just letting us know she's coming, so when she gets to the Cowboy Club and a guy outside hits on her, we're ready for her to knee him in the nuts and headbutt him. I'd like to believe she's unabashedly Strain from there, but we don't quite get enough of her, because we have the story around the gold, we have Obregon's other goons, and we have Tanquil Lisa Collins's character trying to get our heroes off suspension. This is another thing that's corrected in Dallas Connection, as Strain gets after it right away in that one. Still, she's great here, even in her limited capacity.

As I mentioned above, this is produced by Sidaris, not directed, but he still gets a tag for that production work, which gives him 10 total now. This series alone is definitely consideration for a Hall of Fame induction, and even in the capacity of executive producer, his stamp is still on it. From a DTV franchise standpoint, Bloodfist is the only other one in its realm, but these are iconic in a way that the Bloodfist films aren't. If you say "a Sidaris film," people know right away what you mean, and the fact that these are all on Tubi in all their glory is fantastic. When I was younger, these were either on a premium channel on cable--which I would only get as a free preview--or when I got older, there were edited versions on TBS after a midnight airing of Road House. I still get reminders of that time when I see the opening titles in that classic Sidaris typefont, telling us Bruce Penhall and Julie Strain are in the film, only now I'm not wasted and trying to get the room to stop spinning. Here's to you Mr. Sidaris, you truly were one of the greatest for giving us these films.

The United States is a big country, both population-wise and land-wise, and films like this remind me that even someone who's spent his whole life here doesn't really know it as well as you'd think, because it's so big. For example, in this film, the characters go from Dallas, Texas to the Shreveport, Louisiana area, which seems like they should be far apart, but they're less than 3 hours away from each other. Part of it I think is my Northeast bias, but even then, when I was growing up, I had no idea that Philadelphia and New York City were so close, and they aren't as far away as Dallas and Shreveport are from Kittery, Maine. But I imagine people in Dallas can't believe that Kittery, Maine is so close to Boston, Massachusetts, or that it's as close to Providence, Rhode Island as Dallas is from Shreveport. That's why I watch Sidaris films though, to get more in touch with my sense of American geography.

That felt like it could've been the seventh paragraph, so what could I be adding here? It's the fact that in between the last two times I've seen this, I've actually visited Dallas myself. One of the nights I was there I caught a Texas Rangers baseball game, and on the Lyft ride back I got to see this view of the city at night. For people who haven't been before, it's the fourth largest metro area in the US, but it's not like the three cities above it, New York, LA, and Chicago. My Lyft driver told me, it can't decide if it wants to be Atlanta or LA or New York, but I also got the sense that it could've been a real world city like New York or Chicago, but the state of Texas couldn't let that happen. Texas wants to be too provincial to have a world city--or maybe it's afraid of what losing some of that provincialness by having a world city would mean. We're seeing similar struggles in Florida and Georgia with Miami and Atlanta growing, and the people in those states afraid of the same thing Texans were afraid of with Dallas. What you get with them is this uniquely American thing. Dallas feels like it could be a New York or Chicago, but it also feels like it can't, and I don't know that there's anything more American than that--which makes it a great place to set a Sidaris film.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Tubi, which is probably the best way. There's also the Mill Creek DVD, which, if you get that, means you won't have to worry if Tubi ever takes it down--which they've done before. It may not be the best entry in the series, but it's still a lot of fun.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106819

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Alien Uprising aka UFO (2012)

This is one that's been sitting in my Tubi queue for a while now. It's got Van Damme, so I knew I needed to do it at some point; but it also didn't look that great, none of the other big low-budget action sites had covered it, and it was over 100 minutes long. But then Tubi was about to get rid of it, so I figured I'd better make it happen.

Alien Uprising has a group of young people in Derby who go out to a night club and get into some trouble. One of the group is Pierce Brosnan's son Sean, and he meets Jean-Claude Van Damme's daughter Bianca, and the two hook up. The next day, the power's out, and things seem weird. No one thinks too much of it, until the next day a massive UFO is resting in the sky. Now all hell breaks loose, as people are scrambling to get supplies and fighting with each other, while the army is confronting the aliens. Somehow Jean-Claude Van Damme figures in as well. Will the kids make it out alive?

And do we care? Kind of, maybe. There was one character I cared about, so I guess that's something. There was a lot sauteed in wrong sauce here though. First, most of these kids aren't worth caring about, and the movie wrote them that way, so I wasn't sure why I was following them. We also could've trimmed a good 20 minutes off the beginning and been okay. The club scene went on too long, the sex scene went on too long, the next morning stuff went on too long. There was a fight scene between Sean Brosnan and another guy that was also too long, but not only that, chock full of interspersed slo-mo. Like Brosnan kicks a guy in the head, and for some reason they decided to slow that down, only to speed it up right after. Was it that cool of an effect? Finally, the worst part--spoiler alert--everyone dies at the end. If everyone dies at the end, what's the point? Why put everyone through this if you're just going to kill them all off? We did have some moments of legitimate tension, which I think would've had more punch if this was tighter. I guess this is for Van Damme completists only, which is what I am, so if you have a review site and need to get all of Van Damme's stuff reviewed, it's worth it for that.

This is now 34 films for Van Damme on the site. (He has 35 tags, but one is for Post 400, the Van Damme Film Fest.) Can we get him to the 40 Club? Based on my math, we have his newest one, Darkness of Man, and then three others from the 2010s, which gets us to 38, plus he has some stuff in pre-production, so we might get there--though we know from The Eagle Path what can happen with those pre-production movies: nothing. He has a very small part in this, where he comes in at the very end as a former military guy who knows what's happening with the aliens. He sticks around long enough to have a fight scene with his daughter--so he's now had them with two of his kids, after having them in multiple films with his son Kris--then gets blown up by a laser from an alien ship. Again, it's just about being a Van Damme completist, and now I can officially say I've seen this and reviewed it.

Speaking of Bianca Van Damme (credited as Bianca Bree here), I didn't realize that this is her fifth film on the site. (If you're curious, Kris has nine so far.) As I mentioned above, she has a fight scene with her father, and based on her bio, she's trained in martial arts, so she may not have been doubled as much as I thought. Based on her skills and action star lineage, she could have a solid DTV action career, not just in low-budget stuff like this, but those higher-budget things that get picked up by Netflix or end up on Hulu after a short rental window on Amazon. Olga Kurylenko would be a good comp, but again, being able to put the name "Van Damme" on the tin would be a bigger selling point. You could also see lesser roles in big screen films the way Scott Adkins and Daniel Bernhardt have done, like a one-off baddie in that new John Wick film The Ballerina. Imagine if that happened, and Van Damme had to ask his daughter to get him on set instead of the other way around?

I mentioned above that we also had Pierce Brosnan's son in this, but I didn't realize that when I was grabbing images, I thought he was just your run of the mill 2010s bro dinkus type, until I started writing the review and saw who he was, and by then I'd missed my window to grab the images on Tubi. Throughout the movie I was trying to figure out what he looked like, beyond the 2010s bro dinkus type, and when I saw his picture on IMDb it clicked: lead singer of a third-tier 80s British pop act. And maybe not even an actual Brit, but like a Scandinavian or Northern European playing in the third-tier pop act. I wish the filmmakers had had the sense to let him run with that instead, just said "give us full lead singer of A-ha or Nik Kershaw. Just pretend I'm Russell Mulcahy and we're filming your latest video." That was the energy this film needed, and even though it wouldn't have gotten us over the goal line, it would've helped.

Finally, this film was shot in Derby in the UK. Not a place I've ever been to--unless the tour bus I took on my high school trip to the UK went through there between Stratford-upon-Avon and York, but I wouldn't have even known--but I do have an interesting connection to there. At the Goodwill here in South Philly, I found a Derby County scarf. I've probably mentioned before on the site that I'm an Arsenal fan, which started in the mid-90s after the World Cup was here in the States and I became a world football fan, I really liked Dennis Bergkamp, and when I found out he played for Arsenal, that became my team. Anyway, all I really know about Derby is from their Premier League season when they had like 9 points, which might explain why the scarf ended up at Goodwill, South Philly's lone Derby County fan was so disgusted, they donated the scarf, and it sat there for ten years, in among more fashionable women's scarves because the people who worked at the Goodwill didn't know where else to put it, and where it was ignored, until I was there with my wife and happened to see it while she was looking through that section. Had I known going in that this was shot in Derby, I would've dusted it off for the occasion. I saw that they're back in the Championship for next season, and I think those games are on ESPN+ here in the States, so that'll give me a team to root for if I follow it at all.

And with that, let's wrap this up. It looks like this is still available on Freevee, so that may be a way to make it happen. For me, this is strictly for Van Damme completists, and only the hardest of the hardcore of them at that.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2040578/

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Bullet Proof (2022)

I first saw this for podcast episode 146, as part of the Vinnie Jones double feature I did with Will from Exploding Helicopter. On the surface it felt like it was going to be a good Jones vehicle, considering his face is front and center on the cover. Let's see how it did.

Bullet Proof has James Clayton (who also directed and co-wrote) as "The Thief," a guy who steals a lot of money from crime boss Vinnie Jones. Unfortunately in the process of stealing the getaway vehicle, he takes a car with Mia (Lina Lecompte), Jones's pregnant wife, in the trunk. She was trying to escape Jones, and the car he stole was the one one of his henchmen was going to smuggle her out in. This is an inconvenience The Thief just can't afford to take on, but when he realizes Jones is going to have her killed, we find he's also a sucker for a tough case, so he agrees to take her along. Now he's gotta run the gauntlet to get to his plane ride out of Dodge, as Jones is throwing everything he has at The Thief, including his specialist The Frenchman (Janvier Katabarwa). Will The Thief and Mia make it out alive?

First off, this doesn't have a lot of Vinnie Jones in it, but he's great as the head baddie. James Clayton, who neither Will nor I had seen in anything before, was a revelation to both of us as the hero. He also did a solid job directing, as this is a good, straight-ahead actioner. At 96 minutes it's maybe a little long, but we've seen worse; and I do think the fact that Lina Lecompte's Mia character was pregnant created complications that we may not have needed; but we have a lot of great action sequences, the hero's believable, and we want to see him and Mia survive and prevail over Jones and Katabarwa. It's all the things you look for in a good Saturday evening action film.

This is now 15 films for Vinnie Jones on the site, but beyond that I think it was great to give him his due in a full podcast episode. A role as the baddie is what we're used to seeing him do, and he hits it out of the park here, even in a limited role. What's great about his larger-than-life persona is he fills in the space in the many scenes where he's not on-screen, so he's still menacing the heroes and giving us something to root against. In the episode, Will went into Jones's football career with Wimbledon, how he was the face of this upstart team that was making waves in the Premiership. The EPL is different now, a Wimbledon can't muck up a 0-0 draw against one of the top four sides, but when Jones played it was a viable strategy to stay in the top flight, and he parlayed his role on that team to this career he's had which has been a lot of fun, and his performance here is indicative of that.

We often talk about the dreaded "vanity project," and one could make the case that that's what we have here, with James Clayton as director and co-writer, and then he cast himself as the hero. The thing that keeps it from being a vanity project though, is Clayton is really good as the hero. He's likeable and he's believable, which is all you want. Also, it looks like he brought on co-writers that helped keep the film lean and full of action, which was important. The film left the door open for a potential sequel, and whether it's that or another project, it'll be great to see what he has next.Who'd'a thunk we'd go into a Vinnie Jones movie coming out looking at a potential new DTV action lead.

As I mentioned above, the main complication in the plot was that the Mia character was pregnant. It really limits what you can do with her from an action and a damsel in distress standpoint. Who wants to see a pregnant woman jostling the baby around inside her in a car crash? Or dodging bullets? Or tied up by some baddies that want to claim the bounty Jones put on her head? There's a reason why the expectation is that you give up your seat on public transportation to a visibly pregnant woman--though you gotta be careful with that one and not make any assumptions--a human being carrying a tiny human being in their stomach is a big deal, and it's a bad look if you're making the poor lady stand and hold the rail on the subway while you're relaxing in a seat, let alone getting T-boned in a car accident or dodging explosions. I think Lina Lecompte played it well, and her character added a lot to the film that made us root for her and Clayton, but to be honest I still would've rooted for her based on all the other aspects of her character if she wasn't pregnant too.

Finally, the end of the film takes place in an abandoned airstrip, complete with parked planes and shells of broken down planes and helicopters. I asked Will, had one of these shells of a helicopter been blown up, would that have counted as an exploding helicopter in the movie? He turned it around on me and asked how I would feel about it if he included something like that as an exploding helicopter. To be fair, and it probably sounded like I was passing the buck back to him, but I feel like they're his rules to make. The volume of exploding helicopters in movies is something we all probably thought was large, but how large is something else. If you go to Will's Exploding Helicopter Letterboxd list, it currently sits at 825 films, and that number continues to grow as more people find ones and let him know. It's astounding how many movies have exploding helicopters in them, and while this film didn't blow one up, you can check out the Letterboxd list and see how many of the 825 you've seen. (If you're curious, I'm only at 205, a number that should probably be higher considering how many action films I watch.)

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this on the Roku channel here in the States. For a DTV actioner from 2022, it's surprisingly solid, which is all you can ask for. As far as the episode, you can look for episode 146 in the archives, where we discuss this and The Big Ugly.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10198564

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

The Weapon (2023)

This is one I've had in my "to-review" box for a while--if that box even exists. I'm not sure what it would even be, like an old Amazon box? "Why do we have this Amazon box sitting around?" "It's my 'to-review' box." "But it's empty." "Of course, this is all done virtually. Duh." This was also featured in episode 135 of the pod, which I did with Ty from Comeuppance back in October of 2023.

The Weapon is something of a Tony Schiena vanity project starring him, directed by him, and co-written by him. He plays Dallas Ultio, some enforcer for a secret organization, but he also has a beef with bikers because they beat his dad to death when he was a kid. As he's taking down bikers, the woman in his life, AnnaLynne McCord, is kidnapped by Richard Grieco, and he's holding her in some bunker he has. This will be Dallas's biggest challenge yet, but he has a bunch of names here to help him in one- or two-scene cameos so their names can be added to the tin.

And it's those names that manage to keep this thing afloat, but ultimately can't fully save it--though that may actually play in its favor as well. This had potential, but it had too many moving parts, and was tonally off in spots. The scene from Schiena's past where as a kid he watches his dad get beaten to death by a biker was funny, and I know it wasn't meant to be. There's another scene where Schiena burns crooked cop Randall Batinkoff alive that didn't do anything to help Schiena's character. This wasn't like they were fighting and in the course of battle set him ablaze, he had Batinkoff tied to some scaffolding or something. Always love heroes setting helpless baddies on fire. Then we have AnnaLyne McCord screaming about something out of nowhere near the end. It was like, are you in the right movie? While we did have some good fights, even that seemed off, like sometimes Schiena was an unstoppable force, others--for the convenience of the plot I guess--he could be taken out rather easily. On the other hand, as a vanity project, there's an earnestness to this that makes it work in spite of itself in a so-bad-it's-good vein. Schiena wants this to work, he isn't just pulling in a bunch of names to put on the tin so he can sell it, and that earnestness does make it endearing despite all the shortcomings. Also, those names I mentioned helped, especially at the very end when we had Jeff Fahey and Bruce Dern seemingly riffing off each other. We've seen a lot worse here, and we've also seen better, but overall I think this works in a low-budget schlock way, like a Samurai Cop kind of thing, which at 85 minutes for free on Tubi may get you to the church on time.

I didn't realize this, but this is actually the fourth time we've seen Tony Schiena on the site, the last two times being Circle of Pain and Locked Down in late 2010, both films directed by the late Daniel Zirilli. (If you're wondering, the other time was the Van Damme flick Wake of Death, which we did in 2007.) As an action lead he's solid enough, but this is where we get the ol' vanity project catch-22: he's not a high-enough tier of star to get the lead roles in bigger DTV action flicks, so he's forced into making his own vanity projects if he wants the better roles, but those vanity projects are going to end up like this. I was looking at his filmography on IMDb, and he doesn't have much since 2010's Locked Down, so it sounds about right that something like this that he directs and co-writes is the only way he's going to get the work he wants, and somehow he's able to lump a bunch of names in and that gets the thing funded, and having those names gets me and Ty to cover it on the pod and me to review it here.

And boy did we have names. I mentioned Richard Grieco, who looks like a cross between someone cosplaying John Wick and Alice Cooper in the "Poison" video--more on that below. How fantastic is that? This is now 7 films for him on the DTVC. We also have Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. in a one-scene cameo as some kind of mysterious blind man. Your guess is as good as mine, but that one scene now makes 13 films for him on the site, which might be the most by an Oscar winner. While he hasn't won an Oscar, Bruce Dern has been nominated twice, and has become something of a darling on the DTVC podcast episodes I do with Ty. His scene at the end of this with Jeff Fahey is fantastic, the best moment of the movie, which left us with a feeling of "where have you been all our lives? We needed you earlier!" This makes 11 for Fahey, which seems low for him, but it makes sense when you consider we don't really seek out more Fahey, he just happens when we're watching a movie with someone else that also has him in it.

Back when I reviewed Lady Terror for director/writer/star Nathan Hill, I talked about how I didn't get the joke right away, because we see so many vanity project movies that look like that one but are completely serious and being played completely straight, and while I think this isn't the worst of those, it does have those moments that would have me thinking I missed the joke in Hill's film. There were also moments though where I liked Schiena and was rooting for him, so it wasn't all bad. But therein lies the rub, I guess: it's hard to root for a guy when you know he's making a movie to make himself the hero. It almost would be better, if a vanity project is going to play it straight, to have the writer/director person be the baddie, and bring on someone else to be the hero. There isn't as much side eye there, or "oh aren't you so great" cynicism on the part of the watcher. Making a movie, no matter how good or bad, is an accomplishment in itself, and I think from a vanity project standpoint, taking as much of the "vanity" out of it can really help and get us to appreciate more the mere accomplishment of it. By the same token, Ty and I discussed on the podcast how sometimes the vanity project is what gives us that earnestness that makes it work in spite of itself, because Schiena wants this to be good, so maybe vanity projects aren't all bad if they're giving us the so-bad-it's-good element.

Finally, I recently put our podcast on the DTV Connoisseur YouTube page. In the process, YouTube was going through the episodes to see if any had potential copyrighted material. There were some from the early iteration with Jamie that were flagged because I had included Wham's "Last Christmas" in the intros when we were recording them around Christmastime. That made sense, but when I saw that this episode was flagged for Alice Cooper's "Poison," it didn't make any sense. I mentioned it to Ty, and he reminded me that he played the opening to it when we were talking about how much Grieco looked like him in this film. He even asked "is it okay to play this on here?"--which for a Spotify podcast it was, but YouTube caught it right away. What that means is, if you do check the podcast out on YouTube, this episode won't be on there.

But that's okay, you can still find it on Spotify, iTunes, and other major podcatchers, episode 135 in the archives. As far as the movie goes, Tubi is the way to go. This is a schlock bad actioner that kind of works in a Samurai Cop so-bad-it's-good kind of way, which might be enough for you.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18228142

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Three Kinds of Heat (1987)

This was one I watched way back when I did the "Ginty Moore Beef Stew" episode with the guys from Comeuppance, where we listed our top five Ginty films. That's number 85 in the archives, back on May 17 of 2021. I went to review it for the site soon after, but it disappeared from free streamers. So I had to wait, almost three years, until Prime got it, so I could do it now.

Three Kinds of Heat is a Cannon film starring Robert Ginty as a State Department agent on the trail of an evil criminal organization known as the Black Lion. In a shootout in the JFK airport customs area, he meets Hong Kong detective Shakti Chen, and NYPD cop Victoria Barrett. To help in his investigation, INTERPOL allows him to recruit the two women, and now it's an international hunt, as they travel to London, then back to NYC, finding danger and intrigue all along the way. Will they finally take down the Black Lion and save the day?

This is from 1987, but it feels like it might have been '84, and that difference actually plays better for me. For Cannon and Ginty fans, this is probably one of the more lesser-known ones, but it's a lot of fun. The Ginty you get is the Ginty you want, a little sleazy, a little mumbly, but ultimately someone you want to root for and enjoy seeing when he's onscreen. And then Shakti Chen and Victoria Barrett are great as his part of his team. You know Ginty asked to have them help because he thought they were hot, but he also knew they could more than hold their own, which they do. Finally, the action was solid too--perhaps there could've been more of it, but the combination of how great the action we get is, and the fun interplay between Ginty, Barrett, and Chen, it all works. This is a fun Saturday night throwback that will get you to the church on time.

We're only at 8 films for Ginty, which feels low, but when I looked, I did Code Name Vengeance back in February, but hadn't done one before that since December of 2022. Out of the ones I watched for the podcast episode, I think I have a few more of those to cover, as long as they're available on streaming. He doesn't have as much that we can review on the site--I think I count 12 more of his that we could do post, so that would barely get him to 20 tags--but he's so iconic, especially in the early DTV space, that the volume of tags doesn't begin to underscore his overall influence, and a movie like this really drives that home. This is worth watching primarily for Ginty, and he doesn't disappoint.

Cannon Films on the other hand is now at 44 films on the site--you'll see 45 tags, but remember we did American Ninja 2 twice. I think this is probably more substantial as a Ginty film, but it still feels authentic as a Cannon flick, especially from the 80s like this. When that logo appears at the beginning, you get that comfort food feeling telling you you're probably going to have a fun movie night, and the film delivers that quality comfort food you anticipate from seeing the logo. It's another area where the modern DTV flick can't compare. The average DTV movie today has 5-7 production company logos before the film starts, and none of them evoke the kind of feeling you get from one Cannon, PM Entertainment, AIP, Vestron, etc. Because the modern DTV flick can't compete with that, the movies are already working uphill with us as fans, while the Cannon film can use the cache of its logo to put us in a happier mood before the film even starts, forcing us to at least go easier on it, if not like it better as a result. By the same token, it's not just the logo, Cannon films may have been on a budget too, but not to the level modern DTV productions are. Between the fact that this was shot in NYC and London, and the level of special effects employed, you'd never see anything like this today. Imagine a director saying to their line producer they want to shoot in NYC and London today. The producer would laugh and say "just make it work in Georgia."

Our other two stars were Victoria Barrett and Shakti Chen. Barrett we haven't seen on the site before, and she hadn't done much before this, nor much since, but she was really good here, and I thought she and Ginty had great chemistry. Chen also hasn't been in much before or since, but she has been on the site before, in the Gary Daniels film Deadly Target. She's also been in a couple 80s classics, Volunteers and The Golden Child. The other thing is she was married to the film's director, Leslie Stevens, and was with him until his death in 1998. Another fun, solid performance from her, and often while Barrett and Ginty were doing their thing, she'd sneak off on her own, which led to some great interactions, like one where she interrupts a craps game.

Finally, early in the film Victoria Barrett tells Ginty and Chen "this is the Lower East Side, this is no-man's land." For anyone younger, that probably wouldn't make any sense, as the Lower East Side hasn't just been gentrified, it's in like a post-gentrification state. When I had Freddie Young from Full Moon Reviews on the pod to discuss Frankenhooker (episode 156), he talked about all the changes New York City has gone through since that film or this film was made. It's fascinating, because we think of New York as a character on its own, and in this movie it was co-starring alongside another world city in London, and we get that juxtaposition with London as the ritzy city with the fashion show, while NYC is the gritty one with the seedy warehouses and ladies of the night patrolling the streets. I don't know that anyone wants New York to fully go back to what it was--even Anthony Bourdain when he complained about what it became on episodes of No Reservations and Parts Unknown couldn't have fully wanted that--but there's a happy medium between that and the thing it's become. The Lower East Side may not be the no-man's land it was in the 80s, but it's a different kind of no-man's land now.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can stream this free on Prime. That's your best bet, and well worth it. Maybe not the top tier of Cannon and Ginty, but it'll get you to the church on time.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094135

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.