Active Stealth (1999)

Recently Will from Exploding Helicopter posted the exploding helicopter from this film on his Bluesky, and when I looked it up, I thought "how have I not covered this before?" It looks like something I should've done on the site 15 years ago, but somehow slipped through the cracks. In addition to us and Will, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Steve Q at Down Among the Z Movies, and Kenner at Movies in the Attic have covered this as well.

Active Stealth has Daniel Baldwin as a special forces kind of guy who thought his buddy was killed in a mission, only to find he's being held hostage by the drug cartel guy they tried to take down some time ago. Their commanding officer, Fred Williamson, sends Baldwin and his team (including Fred Olen Ray mainstays Tim Abell and Chick Vennera) down to get their friend out, and has them use a plane with the latest in active stealth technology as the means to get there. That's it, in and out, and the film is done in a cool 37 minutes--or is it? It's never that easy, and now it's a matter of who will make it with Baldwin back home to see their families, and who will have a dramatic death scene?

This is your classic IMDb 3.5 star rating complete with user reviews touting it as "the worst movie of all time," but for me who's been doing this for almost 1400 movies plus however many more on the podcast, I see something that's professionally made with a few fun moments. What does that mean for you though, because it may not be anywhere near the worst movie ever or as bad as 3.5 stars on IMDb, but is it worth the 100 minutes the movie's asking of you when you have so many options out there? Here are a few things that I would point to that may help you decide. First, Ray and company have a lot of fun touches that harken back to old post-WWII movies, the best of which might be Chick Vennera, who plays the Italian American stereotype so many of those movies had, and caps off his performance with a too sweet helicopter explosion. Or maybe it's the inclusion of another Fred, Fred Williamson, who doesn't do much beyond talk on the phone, but looks great doing it. Then there's Andrew Stevens, who's just there to wear a mustache and talk in military speak, but looks great doing it too. Or finally, Tim Abell, who's there to be the Southern stereotype to Chick Vennera's Italian American stereotype, and again, looks great doing it. The story meanders a bit, and has the holes in it you'd expect from something that was pumped out more because they had the sets available and could do it quick and on the cheap than anything, and I don't know that those touches above is enough to recommend it, but it had its moments for sure. Also, it'll up your percentage on Will's Films with Exploding Helicopters list on Letterboxd.

We're now at 17 directed movies for Fred Olen Ray, depending on whether or not you count Dinosaur Island as 1 or .5, and I count it as 1, but because of that I give the edge in ranking to Joseph Merhi, who's tied with him at 17 for second all-time after Albert Pyun's 44. This is classic Fred Olen Ray, the studio or whoever wanted a quick and dirty military movie that they could throw on video store shelves or cable channels could use for easy programming, he had the location and called a bunch of people he'd worked with before, and along with some bigger names to add to the tin, they made it happen. He's made a career of getting things done like this, across all genres, and here we have something that works more for our audience than Christmas in Palm Springs or Christmas in Vermont, but even with those his process is the same, he's good at pumping them out on the cheap. If we cut out the Christmas movies and the Lifetime movies, he still has enough actioners and Erotic Thrillers remaining to catch Pyun for most all time, it's more a matter of whether or not we'll be doing the site long enough. Next year we'll hit twenty years, so we'll know by 2047 if I kept things going and Ray finally caught him.

There were two other Hall of Famers in this, Fred Williamson and Cole S. McKay. For Williamson, this was a unique one, in that his character was captured at the beginning, and he's not the hero, or even portrayed as a badass who could be the hero. It really is his name and how cool he looks holding a phone, which I think works in a film like this. He's sitting at 33 films on the site, and looking at his bio, I'm not sure how many more we'll do in the near future. He has a couple he's directed that we still need to do, but it might be more things like this where there are other names involved, and he's more along for the ride, but it's possible that will be enough to get him into the 40 Club at some point. Speaking of DTVC clubs, Cole S. McKay is now at 69 (hey-oh!) films on the site. Our next PM film is going to be The Power Within, which will be the one that gets Art Camacho into the 60 Club, and which also has McKay on stunts, so that'll be his 70th film, but I think he needs something more prodigious for his 70 Club post, so one idea I had was Star Hunter, which he co-directed with Fred Olen Ray. It's possible in the meantime I'll review another movie he did stunts because he has so many of them!

Rounding out the rest of the cast and crew, we have a lot of names to get through. I guess we should start with the film's star, Daniel Baldwin, who felt a bit out of place with all of the Ray mainstays around him, but he's a Baldwin, so the name on the tin means more than whether he fits or not. DTVC favorite Tim Abell is back with his 16th film on the site. Is it possible he's putting together a Hall of Fame resume? Speaking of which, Andrew Stevens will be getting inducted this fall, as this is his 36th film overall between acting, directing, and producing, and I believe his 11th as an actor. Speaking of Erotic Thrillers, Shannon Whirry plays Baldwin's wife. I had never really looked at it before, but a few years before this it looks like she'd stopped doing Erotic Thrillers and was doing more stuff like this, or mainstream TV roles, which I think is okay, considering how many great Erotic Thrillers she made before this. Jim Wynorski was a producer on this, under the name "Noble Henry." When talking about great DTV directors, he's one that probably should have more on the site, but at least he gets another tag here. Finally, wrestling fans will appreciate Terry Funk, who was great as the baddie's righthand man. We've actually seen him two other times on the site, with Road House and Timestalkers. 

Finally, as we're talking about Fred Olen Ray and the DTVC director's tag list, I thought about a picture someone posted on Bluesky of Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg. In the comments another person asked has anyone had worked with all five of them, and the best me or anyone else could come up with was Tom Cruise, who's worked with all of them but George Lucas. That got me thinking about who a similar five would be for DTV directors. Definitely Albert Pyun, Fred Olen Ray, and Joseph Merhi, who I mentioned above. From there I think Sam Firstenberg has to be included too, so then it's a matter of who the fifth one is. I was between Jim Wynorski and Charles Band, but maybe we add both, and it could be like adding Jonathan Demme or Oliver Stone to that other five (and if we do Stone, that five out of six for Cruise). If that's our six, do we have a DTV Tom Cruise who's worked with four or five of them? I was having trouble finding someone who had worked with five, but Tim Thomerson has worked with all but Merhi and Firstenberg, and Dudikoff and Ice-T have worked with all but Merhi and Band--though Merhi produced an episode of LA Heat Ice-T did. I would not have thought Merhi would be the sticking point in a lot of these, because so many people did PM films, but it looks like the case. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Tubi here in the States. I don't know that it's something to seek out, but if you like the names involved, it might do in a pinch. Also, if you're like me and need to get your percentage up on Will's Films with an Exploding Helicopter list on Letterboxd, this will help there too.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0211901

Scorned (1993)

This is one Jon Cross from After Movie Diner and the PM Entertainment Podcast and I will be covering on an upcoming episode of the DTVC Podcast, which makes this one unique, because I usually do the podcast episode first and the blog post after, but I wanted to get some Shannon Tweed up this month and this felt perfect for that post too, so I figured why wait?

Scorned features Tweed as a woman married to a man who's trying to move up the corporate ladder (Dan McVicar), and in so doing, has her sleep with a potential client. When Andrew Stevens swoops in and gets the position her husband was supposed to receive, said husband does the most sensible thing in that situation and kills himself in his old office before he has to vacate it for Stevens. As if this isn't bad enough, Tweed discovers the company won't pay out his life insurance. At this point she has nothing to lose, so she takes on a fake identity as a high school tutor, and gets herself moved into Stevens's family's pool house, where she seduces him, his son, and his wife, while trying to make their lives hell as payback. Will Stevens find out what she's doing in time to stop her?

This is a classic of the Erotic Thriller genre for a reason. You have iconic images like the one above, it hits all the Erotic Thriller bingo card spots, but then you have Tweed turning in this chilling, yet sympathetic performance, a supporting performance from Kim Morgan Greene as Stevens's wife that was better than it had any business needing to be, and then Stevens as a director who understands what makes these movies work, and is able to deliver them at a higher level than most. It has some plot holes, which I won't discuss to avoid giving anything away, but they leave you thinking "why didn't they see that before?" There are also some stunt moments that look a little silly--though we won't put the blame on our man Cole S. McKay as stunt coordinator for that, I don't know if he had the freedom he'd have on a PM flick, because I don't remember a PM flick featuring two dummies falling down the stairs meant to represent two women falling down the stairs together. Overall though, as I said, this is a classic. If you haven't seen it before, or you haven't seen it in a while, definitely try to track down a copy and check it out!

With this movie Shannon Tweed moves into a tie with Kathleen Kinmont for third all-time among women at the DTVC with 10 films, one behind Julie Strain's 11, and way behind Cynthia Rothrock at 47. Obviously we'd like to get that number up, but when you go through her IMDb bio, a lot of the stuff she's done isn't available anywhere. The streaming world is still coming around to embracing the 90s Erotic Thriller, but also some of those films she made then had very limited releases, or only a cable TV release, and now they're possibly gone to us forever. Even this one, something considered a classic in the genre, isn't on any streamers and isn't easy to track down as a physical copy. It's a world that deserves to be seen, so hopefully as many of these movies can be made as available as possible. Back to this one, out of all of the films of hers we've covered so far, this is probably her best performance, and the film itself might be best of those too. She goes for it in every way, and gives us a femme fatale that we almost root for. Out of the ten, I think this is only the second Erotic Thriller of hers we've done, so I think as we get deeper in on this genre, it'll be fun to see more of these, because she's one of, if not the Queen of Erotic Thrillers, and a big part of why that genre was so popular in the 90s.

Another part of that was Andrew Stevens, who directed, produced, and starred in this. While the Queen of the Erotic Thriller could be up for debate (though Jon and I had it between Tweed and Joan Severance), it feels like Stevens is the King. In the We Kill for Love documentary, he talked about how he was transitioning from actor to producer, but understood that as an actor he still had enough of a name to get funding for a movie and sell it better to distributors. What that means, at least for me, is that as an actor he wanted Tweed and their other co-stars to have more of the spotlight, which helps make this a unique entry, because it's told from Tweed's standpoint, when most of these are told from the male lead's point of view. Also, Stevens and his DP, Christian Sebaldt, crafted some really inspired shots, like the one above that looks like something out of a De Palma film. He knew how to make an Erotic Thriller, and the genre wouldn't have been what it was without him, which really comes through in this one.

As I mentioned above, we do have another Hall of Famer in this, stunt coordinator Cole S. McKay, who does stunt coordinating on a lot of Erotic Thrillers. I don't know if I'd say it's his hallmark, but we do get someone thrown through a window. It is interesting that the film decided to go with the dummies falling down the stairs instead of hiring two stuntwomen to do it, and maybe it's safer that way, but beyond PM, I've seen stuntmen fall down the stairs in other Erotic Thrillers McKay was stunt coordinator on, so I wonder if it was a budget and safety thing here. Watching all of these in the 90s when they were new, I had no idea who Cole S. McKay was, but we do take for granted that stunts should look a certain way, without considering who's doing them and what kinds of risks are involved. It's fun now since I've been doing this site and I know who he is to go back and watch these, and admire his work in making it all look realistic--or not if he needs to go with dummies instead of actors.

Finally, what do we have here? A Red Sox cap? How do you not love that? Maybe if you're a Yankees fan, but I can at least appreciate a Yankees cap in the wild too (though to be fair, I didn't mention that Traci Lords's character was wearing an oversized Yankees shirt to bed in the Intent to Kill review--must've slipped my mind!). The team was pretty rough at that period, I couldn't have imagined them not only winning four World Series in the 2000s and 2010s, but also that the ownership group that brought those World Series would be so disliked by Red Sox fans after--me included--because they decided to stop spending and are now treating the team like "hey, aren't you happy we've won four?" Yes, it's been 30 years since that hat was shot in this movie, but it would only be a short 11 years between that and 2004, when the Red Sox broke the curse, which to me that 11 years felt much longer than the 20 years since. With baseball season starting, I'll still be rooting for my Red Sox, even if the owners don't care as much about spending to win as they used to.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is not an easy find, but if you can find it, it's worth checking out. I believe there are some used VHS and DVDs out there, so as long as the dealers aren't gouging you'll be good. And keep an eye out for that podcast episode later this month!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111093/

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

We Kill for Love (2023)

It's the weekend after Christmas, and continuing a tradition I've done since I've come back from hiatus in 2019, we're doing another documentary, this time one that Jon Cross from the PM Entertainment Podcast and the After Movie Diner recommended to us. He and I have been doing a series of Erotic Thrillers on the podcast for the past year or so too, so you can check those out as well over in our podcast archives.

We Kill for Love is a documentary that looks at the rise, reign, and fall of the Erotic Thriller during the 80s and 90s. It examines the mix of genres and inspirations that the films draw from, and the unique cultural environment that gave them birth. We also get some great interviews from people like Fred Olen Ray, Monique Parent, and Andrew Stevens. As time goes on though, the forces that gave us this unique cinematic moment serve to be its undoing, and as the 90s become the 2000s, the market starts to dry up. As our documentarians sift through the VHS detritus of what once was, they and their subjects try to make sense of it all. But is there a sense of it all to make? Does a femme fatale with a handgun in her stocking-top ever go out of style?

Overall I enjoyed this, but it does clock in at two hours and 45 minutes, so you're in for long ride. I'm okay with that though. Yes, it's long for a documentary, but too short for a mini-series, so probably from a streaming algorithm standpoint--and maybe a modern attention span standpoint too, it doesn't quite fit, but I almost feel like that makes it all the better, like the subject matter it's covering, it's not of this time either. The biggest thing is the director, Anthony Penta, pulls footage from so many of these movies, that you feel like you're in the 90s discovering them on cable all over again. And then the interviews are fantastic, with all the actors, directors, producers, and film scholars and film writers telling us how these were made, what they were about, and what kinds of messages were below the surface. As someone who was born in 1979, and grew up in the 90s, there wasn't a sense for me that there was a world before these films, they just always existed, but now 25-30 years later, to see the birth, growth, and unfortunately death and postmortem of something that had such a huge impact on my love of film, especially direct-to-video movies, was a lot of fun, and I think worth checking out--one of the few times I'll recommend something with such a long runtime!

When we started the site, I expected to do more Erotic Thrillers, and while the site moved more toward action movies because those films got the most engagement, that was in comparison to horror, comedy, and sci-fi. Erotic Thrillers on the other hand were the only genre that got the hits on the site that action did, the problem was, in the late 2000s, those movies were harder to find. A lot of them didn't make it to DVD, which was where I got most of the movies we reviewed in those early days; but many weren't even on home VHS release, they were only sold to video rental stores and cable movie outlets. Even on YouTube it was hard to get them, because the adult content would cause them to get taken down. It looks like some of them are making it to Tubi and other free streamers, but with those it's dicey because they can get taken down just as quick. So it's still an uphill battle, but there are ways to get these, so I'm going to do my best to get more of them up on the site, because as this film documents, they're a large part of the DTV legacy.

As I mentioned above, the interviews were great. One of my favorites was Monique Parent talking about how much she was working in the 90s, and how all the movies ran together for her. She gives us an unabashed slice of what that world was like in a way that puts you back there in it. From a Hall of Famer standpoint, we had Fred Olen Ray, who ran the gamut on movies he made in the 90s, but Erotic Thrillers were a big part of that. Between him and Jim Wynorski, they talked about why they needed to use aliases, because distributors were like "we already have enough of their movies!", and Wynorski joked that people on IMDb have found most of his films made under an alias, but there are still a few out there that people haven't found yet. Another big name that was interviewed was Andrew Stevens, and not only did he discuss the Night Eyes series, but also how he moved from actor to producer, and the part Night Eyes played in that. I've finally tagged him for all his producer credits on the site, and this makes film 33, so we'll be putting him in the Hall of Fame next October. Finally, speaking of tags, my rule for documentaries has been if someone was interviewed I'll tag them, but not if it's just footage of one of their films. I'm making an exception to that here for Julie Strain, who gets her own tribute segment in the middle of the movie, which was really nice to see. Here's to you Ms. Strain, you were one of the best to ever do it, you've truly been missed.

We've talked a lot both on the site and the podcast about Blockbuster's role in running the Mom and Pop video stores out of business, and then themselves dying off when Netflix came on the scene, because they had no brand loyalty. This movie gets into some other ways Blockbuster had a negative effect on the DTV industry as the 90s went into the 2000s, but also some other ways that their business model led to their own undoing. The first thing they mentioned was how in the early days of Blockbuster, DTV distributors loved them because they could negotiate big one-off deals of like 20,000 copies, as opposed to getting thousands of individual Mom and Pops to order the movie on their own out of a catalog. It meant in one purchase order from Blockbuster they could get their budget back and then some. The problem was, when the major studios got in on the home video market, both for DTV films and their major releases, the indie distributors got frozen out. This led to something though that I didn't consider. Part of the Mom and Pop business model was only having a couple copies of a new release, that way you'd rent something else if you came in and found the one you wanted wasn't there. With Blockbuster having dozens of a new release, it meant everyone got the movie they wanted, which meant they weren't renting as many movies overall as they did during the Mom and Pop era. The other thing was the cheap DVD market that comes in the early 2000s. Suddenly movies you could only get on VHS, or worse, by taping off cable, were now available for $5 in the bargain bin at Walmart; or those low-budget 10 movies for $10 sets, my friends and I would get one of those and watch three or four over a weekend, and got a better deal out of it than renting that many movies. All of these things led to the collapse of the video market, and took Erotic Thrillers down with them. They tried to pivot in the early 2000s to a more soft-core porn approach, but by the mid-2000s porn was so available for free on the internet that it no longer had any market either.

Finally, speaking of porn, this tackles the subject of exactly what is porn, what that means if an actor is working in porn, and do Erotic Thrillers count. I think the first thing is the double-standard between women working in front of the camera, versus directors working behind the camera. Fred Olen Ray can make two or three Erotic Thrillers a year in the 90s with all kinds of sex in them, and still be able to make Hallmark Christmas movies today, while an actor who took their top off in dozens of sexually charged thrillers may not be afforded that same luxury. And I think there's some of that under the surface when some of the actors who were interviewed insist "I never did porn" the way a guy in the 90s would've said "I'm not gay," as if there's anything wrong with either. I think for my age cohort though, which was 10-20 years younger than the actors in these films, we grew up with them, and as such, we might have been the first mini-generation to look at this stuff differently, and not immediately think someone working in the adult film industry should be shunned, let alone if someone got naked in an Erotic Thriller. From there you get younger Millennials and Gen Z who say you shouldn't judge a sex worker, full stop. In the 80s and 90s there was this Conservative brand of feminism that was anti sex work, which this movie labels as left wing politically, but younger Millennial or Gen Z feminism would say isn't feminism at all, and I think for them, hearing the actors in this trying to distance themselves from the porn industry would be off-putting. In that sense, I hope more of these movies become available on streamers so younger Millennials and Gen Z can consume them, because I think they're a missing part of the story of how we get to the sex positivity of the 2010s. Another thread in the film is this idea that you couldn't make these films today in the world of sex positivity, but I disagree. These movies have a lot of strong women with a lot of sexual agency, if anything they were ahead of their time, and could fit in nicely in the modern environment.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As you can see from my long post, this movie packs a lot in, and I've only scratched the surface of it. While it's free to stream on Tubi you should check it out. The Erotic Thriller was a moment in cinematic time, and if you lived it, the nostalgia factor alone is worth it; but if you're younger and curious about this, this is a great starting place.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10404002

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Victim of Desire (1995)

When I saw that this movie existed, starring Shannon Tweed, Julie Strain, Wings Hauser, and Marc Singer, and directed by Jim Wynorski, I knew I had to make it happen, and luckily I found it on The Internet Archive, so here we are making it happen. What I didn't expect was to have an historical moment on the DTVC in the form of our first ever back door 50 Club entry! Who'd'a thunk?

Victim of Desire has Marc Singer as an SEC investigator looking into businessman Leland Duvall's (Wings) finances after $70 million goes missing. Duvall's also on the hook after a judgement is rendered against him when his defective electric blanket kills over 100 people. When Leland's car ends up at the bottom of a ravine, Singer suspects foul play, so he teams up with an LAPD detective (Johnathan "Johnny" Roastbeef from Goodfellas) to look into what happened, and Duvall's widow (Tweed) seems like as good a place to start as any--and with an erotic thriller like this, you know what we mean by that! As Singer gets in deeper, he gets in deeper with Tweed (insert rim shot) but this leads to all kinds of issues with his investigation, and now Mr. Roastbeef is thinking Singer may be in on it too. It's up to Singer to solve this thing and clear his name, but is he going to be a victim of  desire?

This isn't any kind of classic or must watch, but it's exactly what you're looking for when you fire up a 90s Erotic Thriller--well almost, there isn't as much nudity, this is less on the softcore porn side and more on the thriller side, which works well enough for me, but I can see how that may not work for others. In that sense though the title has a secondary purpose, because if you were a kid in the 90s and saw this on the video store shelf or listed in your TV Guide (who is listed as one of the critic reviews by the way--though they don't review it, just summarize it) and thought "ooh, how much will I get to see Shannon Tweed and Julie Strain naked?" and you end up disappointed, you in fact were a victim of desire. For me, it's the names, the Wynorski direction, and the 90s nostalgia. You get things like Peter Spellos as a coroner eating ribs while he goes over the details of Duvall's death to Johnny Roastbeef, Wings Hauser yelling at Jay Henry Richardson, or Julie Strain giving Shannon Tweed a tension-filled massage when we know Strain is up to something. It's a shame this is only available on the Internet Archive, someone's gotta get a version on Tubi!

Let's get to that back door 50 Club entry. I want to say it was The Sweeper episode of the pod (episode 165 in the archives) where guest Chris "The Brain" Kacvinsky from Bulletproof Action and I were talking about Spiro Razatos, and he mentioned another stunt coordinator for PM, Cole S. McKay. I hadn't heard of him before, despite reviewing a ton of movies on his IMDb bio--and to be fair, I'd only heard of Razatos when Gary Daniels mentioned him in an interview, so other than Art Camacho I was really bad on crediting stunt work overall. So now McKay was on my radar, but in a recent conversation with Jon Cross from The After Movie Diner--and the upcoming PM Entertainment Podcast!--McKay came up, and I realized he probably needed to be tagged. And he was, to the tune of 55 movies! This one we're doing now is 56, which puts him ahead of Art Camacho for third-most all time. Obviously he's a definite Hall of Fame induction this fall, but now I also need to update my 50 Club imaging and the 40 and 50 Club lists--also I discovered that I'd missed a PM tag for one of their movies, so they're at 47 films now. This is not his 50 Club post, we'll do a real official entry in near future, plus this fall he'll be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but for now we'll leave at here's to you Mr. McKay, you're one of the greatest.

This is the second of two originally-produced films starring both Shannon Tweed and Julie Strain, the other being Rowdy Girls, which we've reviewed. (There's also Bimbo Movie Bash which has archive footage of Young Blood, Fresh Meat starring Strain and Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death starring Tweed, but they weren't acting together in that.) It's a shame they didn't do more together, because they have a great antagonistic chemistry. Forget Joan Collins and Linda Evans, this was the Dynasty pairing I wanted to see! And I get why some people seeing this would've been disappointed by the lack of nudity from both actors, but for me the novelty of this being one of only two films they did together makes it a special entry, and one we're lucky to have. For numbers, Strain is now at 10 films, which puts her second all-time among women on the site, after Rothrock's 43, and Tweed's at 9, which puts her tied with Dona Speir for third all-time among women. Since we've pretty much exhausted Speir's DTVC oeuvre, expect Strain and Tweed to keep moving past her, but with Rothrock's lead and the fact that she's been pumping out a lot more stuff lately, they'll probably be competing for second, which I think is all right.

We last saw Wings Hauser about two years ago when we reviewed Original Gangsters, so it's good to get him back on the site. Two years is too long when you consider how much great stuff he still has out there to review, so I need to focus on getting to it, especially some of the great 90s stuff he did that we haven't covered yet. Part of it is availability, but between YouTube, free streamers like Tubi and Plex, and the Internet Archive, more of it is coming to the surface, so I don't have an excuse. And even though this role doesn't have a lot of screentime, the performance he gives us is plenty robust enough to get the job done. It just adds to the overall fun nature of a movie like this to have Wings yelling at people or looking up from his computer with his mouth agape in that way only Wings can do. He's at 23 movies now, and I don't know if we can get him to the 30 Club this year, but maybe by sometime next year. We'll put it on the map to get it done, because he should be there.

Finally, I mentioned above that Peter Spellos has a small part as the rib-eating coroner. He unfortunately left us in November of 2023, but when it came to movies like these, specially ones directed by Fred Olen Ray or Jim Wynorski, he could pop in on these small roles and really deliver something that added more flavor--kind of like the sauce he was dipping his ribs into in this film. My first time ever podcasting was on Drunk on VHS when host Moe Porn had me and Jon Cross on to discuss Hard to Die, and while they both knew who Spellos was, I didn't, so I joked that I thought his last name was pronounced "SPAY-yos," like it was Spanish, which led to a series of jokes and tangents from us after that. Later Jon became friends with Spellos, and I remember him as a guest on Jon's Crosstalk podcast, where not only was he gracious and a lot of fun to listen to, but he also had some great insight on acting. He, like so many other actors at that time, knew what was expected from them in roles like the rib-eating coroner, and as a true professional, he delivered, and in so doing gave the films he was a part of that much more to make them fun for us in the audience. Here's to you Mr. Spellos, you were truly one of the greats, and you will be missed.

And with that, let's wrap this up. I watched this on the Internet Archive, and you can tell by the screens that it wasn't the best quality, but it got me to the church on time. I don't even know if a VHS exists, but hopefully someday soon it'll be more available. Maybe it's not a classic, but it's worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118079

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Droid Gunner aka Cyberzone (1995)

We continue our Hall of Fame month at the DTVC with our next inductee, the great DTV director Fred Olen Ray. There were a lot of options for a film of his to cover for this post, but I liked that this one had a lot of names in it, plus it was free to stream--can never go wrong there. In addition to us, our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has covered this in his "It came from the video store" series, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Droid Gunner (or Cyberzone as you'll see it on the streaming services), has Beastmaster Marc Singer as "Jack Ford," director of such great films as The Grapes of Wrath and Stagecoach--or rather a guy who hunts down androids for a living in the future. When four pleasure droids turn up missing--stolen by one Matthias Hues--, the corporation missing them turns to Singer to find them. Tagging along is a droid specialist from the company, Rochelle Swanson, someone who can deactivate them without damaging them, which is very important when it comes to pleasure droids. Will our hero be able to make all this happen and save the day?

 

This is pure late-night 90s schlock, and I loved it for that. It had your classic Ray Skin-a-max elements, plenty of T n' A, but also great performances from a whole host of names, including, beyond Singer, Hues, and Swanson, Ross Hagen, Peter Spellos, Brinke Stevens, and Kin Shriner (which for someone whose mom watched General Hospital when I was growing up, he was a fun sight). Sure, this is done on a budget, and it bites on all kinds of popular films, like Star Wars, Blade Runner, and For a Few Dollars More, but for the midnight insomnia theater fare that I'm watching it for, it more than delivers.

Ray marks the third director in the Hall of Fame strictly for being a director, the other two being Albert Pyun and Cirio H. Santiago, which, for the DTV fans that we are, is fantastic company. Like those two, he's had some that I really didn't like, some that I loved, and a lot like this where I just enjoyed the ride. I think what I love most about his films, especially from this 90s period, is that he shoehorns a lot of sex and violence into them, but then there are a lot of these other touches like calling the main hero "Jack Ford" or how the plot becomes a take on For a Few Dollars More, which makes it more than just a late-nite 90s schlock exploitation fest. The funny thing is, recently my wife Jen and I were watching a Hallmark Christmas movie that Ray directed, and she was noticing similar touches, like the boy in the orphanage who looked straight out of 50s TV central casting. Like Dacascos, Ray's induction is probably one that's long overdue, but great to finally make happen.

 

The same way we needed to bring up Byron Mann in Dacascos's induction post, we'd be remiss if we didn't continue our efforts to spotlight Matthias Hues as well. He plays a bit of a roguish baddie in this, but also has a lot of fun with it, which is great to see. His playfulness underpins the tone Ray was going for, despite some of the dark future nature of the movie overall. As I've said in previous posts, we generally think of the stars as the people who carry these low-budget films, but when you look at the number of supporting people in this, many of whom do a lot of Ray films, you can see how important it is to have people like Hues who can show up and do their thing to round out the film and make it fun despite the time and budgetary constraints. Here's to you Matthias Hues, you're one of the great ones.

It's strange that we aren't getting to Marc Singer until the sixth paragraph, but with the DTVC, it's hard when you're in a Fred Olen Ray film that has Matthias Hues in it. Anyway, I really liked Singer here as the hero. He seemed to get what Ray was going for with the gunslinger-Western type, and he leaned into it well. Looking at his bio, it does surprise me that we don't have more of his stuff on here. I think other than this, we just have Savate with Olivier Gruner and Ian Ziering. He didn't even have a tag yet, which is crazy for someone of his stature. Well, we've at least taken care of that now. I'll need to at least cover the Beastmaster films in the future, so I imagine this won't be the last of him we see here.

 

Finally, among the other costars, I wanted to mention Kin Shriner, who is best known (though probably not known at all to most reading this) for his role on General Hospital. I bring this up, because my mother used to watch the ABC Soaps when I was growing up: All My Children, One Life to Live, and of course General Hospital. At that time, all of the three major broadcast channels had at least two, if not three or four daytime Soaps on--many people were up in arms in the late 80s during the Oliver North hearings, which preempted them a lot if I remember correctly. Anyway, my wife and I decided to check the other day, and on ABC, only General Hospital remains, and then Days is still on NBC, and CBS has Young and the Restless and Bold and the Beautiful. That's it of a once proud TV genre. Who knows exactly what did it, maybe fewer housewives staying home--though in college my bodybuilding buddy couldn't go to class before Days was over--; or my hunch, that the proliferation of talk shows and court shows, which don't require paying writers and actors, made Soap Operas less cost effective; and unlike scripted prime time TV, which saw a revival in the 2010s after being decimated by reality shows and true crime shows in the 2000s, it looks like the Soaps didn't have the same recovery. I want to say it's too bad, but obviously I wasn't watching them to know how many of them had been cancelled already, but it is still too bad for the people out there who did watch them for so long. Maybe saving the Soaps that are left is a good cause for me to take up...

But before we do that, it's time to wrap this up. You can stream Droid Gunner aka Cyberzone a lot of places for free, in particular Tubi, which has a good ad rate. I say, the next time you're up in the middle of the night and looking for something to watch, give this a spin. It'll take you back to the 90s in a good way.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112906

Steel Sharks (1997)

He we are with the second of the Stars Play 11, and I believe the only one with a DTVC Hall of Famer in it. Good old Gary Busey, and we know we always need to get some Busey up here anyway, so why not put him in now. This one also has Billy Dee Williams and Tim Abell, so it's got a pretty promising start--on the other hand, it's a movie about subs, which usually doesn't work on the DTV level. Let's see how it went.

Steel Sharks is about a chemical weapons expert who's been kidnapped by the Iranians so they can tap into his know-how and bump up their WMD game. Billy Dee Williams, a high ranking naval officer, sends in his best SEAL team, but they run into problems and are taken captive and held on a submarine in the gulf. Luckily, sub captain Gary Busey is out there too, manning the USS Oakland. Combine that with the SEALs looking to make an escape, and it all spells bad news for the baddies.

I liked this one on a late 90s DTV bad actioner level. It has enough going on to keep me interested, and, while it's not outstanding, it gets me to to the church on time. It's a weird combination of styles, where we have the over-the-top (Stallone style) PM Entertainment-esque shoot out, with massive amounts of ammunition unloaded and explosions aplenty; then it transitions into Die Hard on a sub, as our SEALs look to make their escape. You'd think all of that would spell a low level of Abusiveness, but that's not the case either. He makes tons of great Busey faces, and has tons of great Busey lines, as he leads his sub through the film's conflicts. Even better is watching him play off of character actor and major That Guy Larry Poindexter. Throw in Billy Dee Williams, who's great in anything; and Tim Abell who's solid as a member of the SEAL team, and you've got a good, late 90s bad actioner.

As I said above, this film is fairly Abusive. I was worried, because he's introduced around the 25-minute mark as the SEAL team embarks on its mission from his sub, and then, I figured he'd be pretty much done once they left and went on their way. Not at all. Once they get into the sticky situation, he's right there, and he has tons of funny anecdotes and goofy faces, everything you'd want from a Busey flick.

People often ask me, "who's your favorite Star Wars character?" That's right, Lando Calrissian, played by one Mr. William December Williams. He's going to be 75 this year. 75! To put it in perspective, five days before he turns 75, I'll be 33, which was the same age he was when The Empire Strikes Back was released in 1980. Even in this he was closing in of fifty--and fifty after it was released--and he was still as cool as the other side of the pillow. As a fellow Aries, I should've been making a better attempt to review more of his stuff, especially since my buddies and I have watched so many of them back when I was in high school.

This movie did a great job mitigating the issues inherent in a submarine flick, especially of the DTV variety. Instead of trying to make stock footage of subs cut with actors yelling out random coordinates, other actors yelling back that they can't do it, shots of blips on radars, ending with an explosion superimposed over the stock footage, then some Star Trek-style bridge shaking; this film only went to that well a little bit, and did it with Busey anchoring the on set scenes. For the most part, instead, it was solid action with guys shooting, fighting, and setting each other on fire, which is what we come to an action film to see, not stock footage of subs.

I wanted to take this last paragraph to spotlight Larry Poindexter. He's usually a bit player verging on a character actor, who has around 125 IMDb credits in his CV. The guy is just solid, whether he's a police detective, some teen's off-beat dad, or a junior officer working under Busey like he is here. In a way, his character attempting to make sense of Busey is like us, the viewer, trying to make sense of Busey too--he's a metaphor for our viewing experience. Here's to you Larry Poindexter, you're one of the good ones.

You can get this on DVD relatively cheap, so that's what I'd do. Not something you want to go out of your way for, but if you see it in a bargain bin or used for under $5, don't hesitate to pull the trigger. This is the Busey-helmed bad actioner you came for.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117738/

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/

Capitol Conspiracy aka The Prophet (1999)

The tagline for this Don "The Dragon" Wilson actioner is "When they're in your head, how do you watch your back?" You know, that's an excellent point, how do you? It's definitely something to consider. I mean, I've always wondered how I watch my back period, right? But when they're in my head, of course, that would bring up a whole new set of difficulties. A lot to think about. In addition to us, the guys at Comeuppance and Mitch from the Video Vacuum have covered this as well.

Capitol Conspiracy has Wilson as a Company Man sent to take out five deadly terrorists spread out over LA. Turns out he's taking out five people who, like himself, were a part of a CIA experiment when they were kids that gave them ESP. Now The Company wants to retire him, and he doesn't know who he can trust--but Wilson is used to it being him against the world, so it's The Company that should be worried.

This had some lull moments and lost steam about midway through, but otherwise was a pretty serviceable Wilson actioner. It got a little too bogged down as the plot replaced the action, which we know is a no no, but Wilson made up with it with some solid fight scenes, and a couple good shootouts. Where Capitol Conspiracy makes its money though is in its mockability. Wilson makes some great faces, there's a hilarious love scene set to the same piano music you'd expect during a stalking scene in a Lifetime movie, and the bad guy looks like he's modeled his career on Frank Zagarino (more on him later). I don't know, so much of this was sauteed in wrong sauce, but it's also a lot of fun.

This is kind of rare for a Wilson flick, they're usually either pretty sweet, or they suck hardcore and we're wondering what the hell they were thinking. This one worked in spite of itself--though not through any lack of effort on the part of the filmmakers in trying to kill it with a bad plot. This also had deleted scenes on the DVD, which were very telling. None of them had any action, and in two of the three, Wilson was doing more acting, which we know is never a good thing, so it's nice to see that some positive editing was done. Can we thank director Fred Olen Ray for that?

This guy here looks, sounds, and smells like Charles Napier. How can that be? Who casts a poor man's Charles Napier? How does a poor man's Charles Napier get work? Napier is in like five-to-ten movies a year, how did Fred Olen Ray and Roger Cormen not lock him up for the three or four scenes that this guy was in? Wow, poor man's Charles Napier--I guess if you watch enough of these, you'll see everything, and I kind of feel like I've seen it all now. Time to just don that sombrero, hop on that mule, and ride off into the sunset.

A buddy was telling me about how a friend of ours called a salon about ten years ago to see if they could cut his hair so he'd look like David Bowie. This is what he said the phone call was like: "Hello, are you familiar with the artist Dav-id Bow-ie? Are you familiar with the Low era?" When I saw how much the bad guy in this looked like Frank Zagarino, I thought of my buddy. "Hello, are you familiar with the actor Frank Zag-ar-in-o? Are you familiar with his Project Shadowchaser films?"

The crux of this film was about CIA experimenting on children in order to give them ESP. Awhile back I saw a link on Tumblr to a Wikipedia article on unethical human experimentation in the US, and the section on government research during the Cold War was particularly chilling. A lot of psychological tortures in the attempt to make easily manipulated human zombies, done on innocent people off in secret hospitals and a horse stable in Montreal. The ESP aspect of this was far fetched, but the rest of it was pretty realistic. Okay, the majority of Capitol Conspiracy was not realistic, but the experimenting part was.

This is not available on Netflix for some reason or another, but you can actually buy it new at Amazon on DVD. I'd wait on this one though, until you've made your way through more of Wilson's other flicks, including the Bloodfists. Not his worst, but not his best either, so if you're going to commit $5.88 or whatever, make sure Wilson is someone you want to invest in.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0155060/

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/

Blood Angels aka Thralls (2005)

I first saw this about four years ago, around the time I was first starting the DTVC, when it aired at 2AM on Sci-Fi (now SyFy). I wasn't entirely fond of it, and though it was a Lorenzo Lamas flick, I put it on the back burner, wanting to hit more of his 90s DTV action classics first. Then Netflix put it on Watch Instantly, so I put it in my instant queue, and forgot about it again. The vegan straw that ended up breaking the carnivore's back was when Netflix put the warning out that they were about to dump it from Watch Instantly, which put my cheeks to fire and made getting this done a priority.

Blood Angels, aka Thralls, is about a group of women who were turned into some kind of slave style vampire by vampire master Lorenzo Lamas, and held in a white room of a mansion, shackled at the ankle. They escape with a plan to turn themselves into full vampires so they can go back and take Lamas out. The only thing they have to do is perform some ritual on the night of the Winter Solstice, which they plan on doing through the help of a rave they're running. Only problem, Lamas is after them, and he's less than stoked that his possessions have run out on him.



This wasn't too bad. I'm not sure why I didn't like it so much then, but I don't have the same animosity now. The whole thing was pretty much played for laughs, a vampire/horror/comedy so to speak, coupled with a lot of hot bodies, including the female stars. I had two big problems with it though: first, to do a comedy like this, the key is to not let the joke get stale, which is kind of what happened here. On top of that, it's hard to do comedy while at the same time falling back on a lot of cliches that traditional horror films like these use, especially the drawn out "who's going to stop Lamas's evil ritual before it's finished?" plot device, which was so tedious in the context of the rest of the film. The other problem was that a good chunk of the film's appeal was based on the appeal of the female stars, both for their beauty and their abilities as strong, no nonsense vampire business owners; but so much of that appeal is diminished by how dimly lit the rave scenes were. In fact, we only see the women clearly when they're being held as slaves by Lamas. In the end, it's one of those things where the intentions were good, which made the film fun, but there wasn't enough focus, which made the film not as much fun as it could've been.

I'm probably going to take a lot of heat for this, because Lamas isn't the most popular of our Hall of Famers here at the DTVC, but he acquitted himself very nicely in Blood Angels, especially in the comedic realm. No, I'm not getting soft on my old age, I'm dead serious, the guy was legitimately funny. He has this one great scene where he rips a drag queen's head off, throws it to his friend-- another drag queen-- then tells him "I think you'll need to find another ride home." To me, that's pretty fantastic. The problem is, even though he's top billed, the cover tells the true story, because he only has a supporting part as the head baddie-- though maybe that's not so bad, because it didn't give him a chance to get stale like a lot of the rest of the humor.



I want to say it started with the Blade series, but somewhere along the line, among the many powers vampires possess, a mastery of martial arts became one of them. "I'm bit, now I have superhuman strength, like to hang out at raves, and can do Kung Fu." For women, it's supposed to have the added effect of empowerment, the idea that beefy, musclebound oafs can be taken down by thin, seemingly diminutive, pretty girls. We get a good sense of that early on when one of the vampires takes out a gang of thugs planning to sexually assault her and her sister, and then the theme comes full-circle when the girls team up to take down Lamas. I bring this up because, while this is the trend, the most popular vampire saga of the moment, the Twilight series, bucks this by featuring a diminutive female lead who is protected by her stronger vampire beau.

This film took place in Iowa, but was shot in British Columbia. I don't get that. Why can't it be set in British Columbia? Maybe get some shots of Vancouver in there too. I've never been, but I hear it's the most beautiful city in North America. Has it been proven with American test audiences that on average, we don't enjoy a film as much if we know it takes place in Canada? It must be the same focus group data that was used in the 80s to determine that Journey should get the most airplay on nationwide corporate radio stations. The other aspect of this I didn't get was the idea of city dwellers versus those from the country. In Iowa? Is there that big of a disparity between Des Moines and the rural outskirts? I only mention this because I grew up in Maine, and I didn't see that much difference between the people from Portland-- the state's biggest city-- and the people from the more remote locations I'd been to.



One cool thing in Blood Angels was this quick reference to Hunter S. Thompson. One of my earliest influences in writing was Thompson, and I know a lot of other writers in the country would say the same thing. It's hard not to be inspired after reading his stuff, and though I don't see as many of his fingerprints in my current state as a writer, when I go back about ten years and look at old drafts, I'm almost mimicking him entirely.

This is no longer available on Watch Instantly as of this posting, which means you can either get it on DVD or wait for it to pop up on SyFy again. It's pretty nondescript, and other than the Lamas humor, it doesn't really bring anything special to the table. I'd say you could do a lot worse at 2AM, you're procrastinating on that final paper, and you see this on TV; but to go out of your way to find it isn't worth it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404496/

Strategic Command (1997)

This is one of those ones that you know, based on the premise and who's making it and just the overall feel, that it's probably going to hurt; but then I see names like Michael Dudikoff and Richard Norton, and I think "okay, this might be sweet"... or I think "I'm the one who came up with the bright idea for me to do a blog on DTV movies, and have guys like Norton and Dudikoff in some kind of Hall of Fame, so now I need to take my medicine, get my whuppin', so to speak." There's no getting around a movie like Strategic Command, I just have to get through it quick, like I'm peeling off a Band-Aid.

Strategic Command rips off Executive Decision, only on a smaller scale, and with some minor tweaks. Michael Dudikoff is a scientist/former Marine special forces officer who designs some nasty shit called Bromax. It's the best industrial floor cleaner on the market-- er, rather, it's an agent used in chemical warfare that will kill people by violently inducing the same phenomenon in them as the kid in elementary school that we'd make laugh so he'd cough milk out of his nose. Anyway, Richard Norton steals it, then hijacks a plane chartered by the Vice President, threatening to blow it up over LA if his demands aren't met. Dudikoff wants to be a part of the rescue team, because his wife was a part of a news interview crew, lead by Bryan Cranston (yes that Bryan Cranston, Tim Whatley, Malcolm in the Middle, Breaking Bad...). Anyway, that's pretty much it.



Wanna see something exciting? Watch this, I'm going to run some stock footage of a generic 747, then run some stock tension music over it. Exciting, huh? Beyond that, this was a sack of ass crack. The only potential good stuff came at the end, but they ruined the fights between Norton and Dudikoff by having them in too confined a space. I know what you're thinking, they're on a plane, it's supposed to be cramped. Yes, except they had enough space to have a more traditional fight between (this kind of movie mainstay) Larry Poindexter and Norton's girlfriend. Really, that's what you're going with? The rest was just crap about will they or won't they shoot someone, will the hostages or won't they try to take back the ship, will Dudikoff save the plane in time before the F-16s shoot, yadda yadda yadda. If I've said it once, I'll say it 100 times: planes, space ships, submarines, etc. do not make action films by themselves. Action must be pumped into them. Yes, I know I'm watching a mindless action film, but when you leave out the action part of it, I'm just left with mindless.

This is like five or six Dudikoff films that are all about the same. Crash Dive, Black Horizon, Black Thunder, Counter Measures, Ablaze, and now this all follow the same pattern. Disaster or hijacking. Call in Dudikoff. Michael Cavanaugh as a higher up. Larry Poindexter as not. May or may not contain Marcus Aurelius. The thing with these is, there's some better stuff of his sprinkled around them, like Bounty Hunters or Moving Target. It's like they're taunting us with good Dudikoff. Still, these wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so boring. Also, as I noticed in this, there can be some long moments without Dudikoff on-screen, which makes it even worse. Here's the thing, if you want to do Die Hard on a plane, do frickin' Die Hard on a plane, don't act like you're going to do it, then inundate us with the same old crap.



Speaking of Die Hard on a plane, Richard Norton's character is named Carlos Gruber. Not as cool as Hans, and there was no great scene where Dudikoff is on the walkie talkie imploring him to "back off Carlos, you've made your point" while Norton looks on, stoned face, saying "hit 'em again." This definitely could've used more of that in it. I'd even have settled for Clarence Gilyard saying "the quarterback is toast!" Anyway, to get on the plane, Norton dons this disguise that makes him look like he'd be one of my dad's friends. Not in the Huey Lewis sense, where he could be anyone's dad's friend, but specifically one of my dad's. I could see someone that looks like him in 1997, when this film was made, pulling up to my parents' place in his Ford F-150, and ask my dad if he could borrow some tools or equipment to do some job.

A quick shout out here to the late Paul Winfield. He was in many films during his long career, but my personal fave of his was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Remember, he had bugs put in his ear with Checkov. That new Star Trek movie wasn't bad (I think I reviewed it at the end of another post somewhere), but I've yet to see anything that does it for me like part II.



I'm not sure how many of my readers are also into the Golden Age of Hollywood (I hate saying "old movies" because it's so dismissive), but these movies and their usual suspects casts feels like those Warner Bros. pictures from the 30s and 40s, where after I've seen a few, I recognize a lot of the same faces in the supporting roles. Then I see them on TCM, and Robert Osbourne is telling me about this one or that one who did like 50 movies in the 30s as everything from a stable hand to a gang leader, and how this was his big break, and he was even nominated for an Oscar or something. The difference here is, all I get is a feeling, because there's no productions company, no producer, no director, nothing in common that ties all of these movies with their casts that include guys like Michael Cavanaugh and Larry Poindexter, among others, all the time. And it's always these Dudikoff disaster/political intrigue movies too.

I thought this was out of print, but it turns out it's in print, just that Netflix doesn't carry it. Still, with Amazon, the shipping alone will put this outside of what it's worth-- and to be honest, unless you're a Dudikoff completist, anything more than zero isn't worth it. For second opinions, you can check out our friends over at Explosive Action and Comeuppance Reviews.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120224/

Ablaze (2001)

Being that we're making a final push to get the rest of Michael Dudikoff's DTV oeuvre up at the DTVC, I knew I'd have to do this bad boy sooner or later. Let's get through it together, like we're peeling off a Band-Aid, all at once.

Ablaze is a convoluted mess of a plot about a fireman who does police work with Ice-T and works in a fire station with Michael Dudikoff. Either that, or it's about Tom Arnold, who owns both an oil refinery and a hospital that makes patients pay for play (this film might have been ten years before its time in that aspect!). In a stroke of what would've been irony had it not been in a contrived movie, Arnold's refinery has a massive explosion, causing an enormous disaster in the city, and his hospital is the nearest source of emergency care, causing altruistic doctor Amanda Pays to dump Arnold's bottom line based health care in favor of humanitarian medicine. Then something called a firestorm threatens the hospital, and Dudikoff has to bring the firemen in to save them.



On the sleeve the disc came in from Netflix, the synopsis read like this:

A by-the-book investigation into a hotel fire generates quickly into a mad rush to find a deadly arsonist as killer infernos begin raging all over the city. The cops soon discover that someone is creating deliberate death traps -- picture-perfect fires for a serial arsonist turned serial killer! Heading up the investigation is none other than Tom Arnold. (That's like tossing gasoline on a smoking ember, isn't it?)

Had that been the actual movie, it might have been great, and in the first ten minutes, where there's this too sweet chase with Ice-T and our fireman hero going after some serial arsonist, it looked like that's what we were getting. But that wasn't the movie, and instead we got a convoluted disaster pic with no identity, manufactured tension that often made no sense, and a great cast that was essentially wasted-- and when I say wasted, I mean they weren't in the movie nearly enough. Dudikoff, Ice-T, Tom Arnold, and William Zabka were all wasted, receiving little to less screen time. Amanda Pays had a little more to do, but it wasn't enough to save this from leaving me thinking "what's the point?"

I think Soldier Boyz thinks this was the dumbest movie Michael Dudikoff has ever done. A former special forces soldier recruiting kids from a juvenile prison to rescue a girl from Vietnam thinks Ablaze was ludicrous. Usually I applaud Dudikoff for playing it straight and lending bad films like these credibility, but in the case of Ablaze, it ended up being a bad look for him. This was not a movie that needed credibility, it didn't need humoring, it needed someone on the other side sharing in every moment that left us nonplussed, not pretending that we shouldn't be stunned or not knowing how to respond. Tom Arnold, for instance, did do that for us. In every scene he was in, you could see him mailing it in with fourth class postage, and that's what this film was worthy of.



I shouldn't be so harsh on Ablaze, because in watching it again yesterday for the blog, I could see where it went wrong. It was this constant adding of pieces, tacking things on, trying to fix things, but only making them worse. It was someone thinking he or she had a concept for a disaster movie, but not seeing that it was an idea sautéed in wrong sauce. The thing that I think was unforgivable, though, was gathering this huge cast and pretty much having them there for their names on the box.

I was joking with a buddy the other day about how growing up, we all feared that going into high school, we would get picked on by kids who were like William Zabka. Of course, we grew into teenagers, actually went to high school, and learned there were no William Zabkas, and the only fears we had were of the teachers catching us making a dime-sack transaction in the bathroom. Still, Zabka to this day resonates as one of the ultimate 80s baddies. I mean, we almost expected to see his face during the big Darth Vader reveal at the end of Return of the Jedi. In Ablaze, he does play a bad guy, Tom Arnold's right-hand man, but he's as wasted as everyone else, getting killed off early on.



As much as this movie was bad, it was also weird, but weird in a bad way. One of the weirdest was the running story of an aging starlet in purple, snake skin print leather pants, who was acting as a nurse or something. She helps out a kid, talks to our hero, then, inexplicably, disguises herself as a patient and walks out into the inferno between the hospital and the waiting firefighters, and gets herself burned to death. None of it made any sense, and just added to my disdain for the film-- though ladies, you shouldn't let this paragraph deter you from wearing purple leather pants if you're ever so inclined.

This is available on DVD through Netflix, or to buy in a lot of bargain bins (I found it at Big Lots, though of course I passed on it). Seeing all the names will probably be enticing. Don't let them fool you, this is a 90 minute painfest with little to redeem it. If you're a major chase scene connoisseur, you may want it for the opening scene, which was legitimately good, otherwise, stay away.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217979/

Black Horizon aka Stranded (2001)

This was a Michael Dudikoff flick I'd had a little trouble coming across. The way it looked, I was under the impression that there wasn't going to be much Dudikoff in there anyway, so I wasn't too worried; but when I came across it recently, I figured I'd go for it.

Black Horizon is about an orbiting space station manufactured by some rich corporation, and the corporation cut corners-- sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? Now its orbit is disintegrating, and the station is falling into the Earth, requiring NASA to send a rescue vessel. To add a little spice to the affair, the company is manufacturing a fancy death ray, and the NSA wants the plans for it before the crew is evacuated. But hold on cowboy, we aren't done yet, there's an asteroid shower pelting the area, and Dudikoff's (he's our ace astronaut) ship is damaged. How will they get down?



At least when movies like this were made in the 50s, we could say it was the 50s, and laugh at them, or get a kick out of the technology. When the exact same paradigm is recycled in 2001, it's just a plain old snooze fest. We all grew up watching space shuttle launches in school, so splicing in the stock footage isn't exciting, no matter how much stock excitement music you pump into the background. The only really cool and intriguing stuff was the investigative work Ice-T's character was doing on the ground to figure out what the corrupt businessman was up to-- though even then the second shoot-out he's in is just a lame old people firing on each other out in the open, and no one hitting anything kind of deal. Dudikoff does his best-- he is in it a fair amount, contrary to what I initially thought going in-- but he's working on a tired retread of a plot that's been reused to death. We go through the same crap of the film makers playing God and deciding on a whim who gets to live and who dies by random horrible accidents or tedious twists of fate, stretching out 35 minutes worth of plot over an hour and a half. If I want a movie like this, I'll just watch an old MST3K episode.

After this post we'll have only 6 films left to complete Michael Dudikoff's DTV filmography here at the DTVC. Black Horizon is definitely one we could've done without, though. I mean, don't get me wrong, Dudikoff is fun as an astronaut, but he's at his best when he has bad guys to defeat, and stuntmen to beat the crap out of. It's boring to see him in a space suit simulating a space walk. I'm trying to think, of all the Dudikoff flicks we've done on here, which ones were worse, and I'm not sure there were any-- I mean some were close, but...



I really liked Ice-T here. He's seldom a good guy in DTV films, which has always struck me as odd, because he made a great good guy in Law and Order: SVU-- I'm not saying he doesn't make a good baddie, just that maybe there should be a more even split. Anyway, he plays an NSA agent, which in this film means he's like a police detective who occasionally throws around secret service lingo about "cleaners" and whatnot. He had one great scene where these guys ambush his hotel room, and he hides out in the bathroom, waits for them to stop shooting, then jumps out and pops them all. I'd like to see more of that Ice-T, and less of the gangster.

Fred Olen Ray directed this. I think that's like five or six he did with Dudikoff (it's hard to go through Ray's filmography on imdb, because for every relevant DTVC film listed, there's like five or six skin flicks), and I think The Shooter is the only one I gave a favorable review to-- a lot of them actually are like this, tons of stock footage mixed with very boring premises, like stranded space ships or submarines or planes. He's definitely one that would be primed for a look at the Hall of Fame, but we'll need to not only review more of his movies, but review more winners.



I was trying to figure out where I recognized Yvette Nipar from. It was the RoboCop TV show. She also did the two Walking Tall sequels (part 2 and part 3) which starred DTVC favorite Kevin Sorbo, and which are her last two listed credits on imdb. She's that DTV heroine who, though still very attractive, isn't there merely for eye candy and sex scenes and to be rescued. I've noticed that Dudikoff, more than most DTV action stars, works really well with that type of female co-star. It's too bad they were wasted here, because they would've been much better in a Bounty Hunters style actioner-- and it would've been much more fun for us.

I don't know what to say about this one. It's hard to come by, and maybe that's a good thing. It's out of print, but you can get it used on DVD if you're so inclined, but you're probably better off not being so inclined, if you know what I mean. Boring, well-worn material that even Dudikoff couldn't rescue.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274905/