Ninja Cheerleaders (2008)

After watching Michael Pare in Direct Contact, I decided to look him up on imdb and see where to go next with him. This jumped to the top of potential candidates because it also has George Takei. I'll watch that guy in any movie. He's amazing.

Ninja Cheerleaders follows the exploits of three young girls who are attending a crummy local junior college with dreams of going to Brown. To make money, they work as Go-Go dancers, or de facto strippers that don't show boobs or vagina. They're also well trained ninjas. Their sensei, George Takei, is also their boss at the strip club, and he's captured by Michael Pare, a crime boss that just got out of jail, and who wants the strip club back. Pare also took the money the girls saved to go to Brown. Now the girls have to free Takei, make the game as cheerleaders, and pass all their finals.



This wasn't bad. It was funny, it had Takei and Pare, and the martial arts was decent. One of the ninja cheerleaders was Trishelle from The Real World Las Vegas and various challenge episodes after, which was interesting. It also wasn't over-the-top silly, which sometimes these movies can be. It definitely came off better than Zombie Strippers.

What I didn't like was the fact that A) these empowered women were working as strippers, and B) the man that gave them their empowerment was their boss at the strip club, Takei. Then it got even more muddled, when, after Pare took Takei and their money, they talked about how much they couldn't stand being strippers and how they didn't want to do it anymore. I guess what I'm wondering is why Takei would hire them as strippers if he wanted them to be empowered females. Waitresses at his club would've been a more realistic job for the plot. Even more realistic would've been to dump the money angle, have them going to Brown based on their grades with need-based grants, and them having to save Takei and get their finals done at the same time. Sometimes the people who make these movies just need to understand the art of parsimony.



Michael Pare as the bad guy wasn't in this much, which kinda sucked. He was also the bad guy in Direct Contact. I guess I'll just have to get my act together and procure some of his older catalog. I was talking to a buddy the other night, and he was saying how the CD version of the John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band album doesn't have "Tender Years" on it. I only had the tape, so I had no idea, but when I looked it up on Amazon, "Tender Years" was listed among the tracks. Either way, that album is very underrated in the discussion of great 80s music, and if you haven't checked it out, you should.

George Frickin' Takei. Gotta love him. The voice is the best. What I'd like to see is a Rush Hour style film with Takei and Pare as cops. They had such great on screen chemistry, they'd be more fun to watch than any I've ever seen in a cop buddy picture. Maybe you could have a scene where Pare and Takei are forced to do kareoke at a Japanese gentleman's club, and they sing "On the Dark Side". He's just so Takei-tastic, you know?



As I mentioned above, this has Trishelle from The Real World Las Vegas. That season, of course, was the one where MTV officially decided that pretty people fighting made for better ratings than interesting people fighting, and the show hasn't been the same since. I stopped watching it around Austin, I think. The second and third seasons, LA and San Francisco, to my mind, were some of the best television ever. Forget reality television, I'm talking television. Especially season 2. I can't believe that's not on DVD. As far as Trishelle being a great actress, she was playing a ninja cheerleader with the academic chops to go to Brown. Do you see her making that believable?

I wouldn't make a priority out of seeing this. It was good, but it wasn't that good. If you need some Takei, go with Live By the Fist first, and maybe listen to him saying "Wang" on Howard Stern, before you waste any effort on this bad boy.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0972857/

Live by the Fist (1993)

This movie was a suggestion from my friend over at Movies in the Attic (a link to which you can find in the section titled "Other Great Sites"). I checked out the trailer on YouTube, and knew I had to shoot it to the top of my Netflix queue. You're talking Jerry Trimble and George Takei, does it get any better? Sure, Heat was able to boast the first ever on-screen pairing of Pacino and De Niro, but in my mind, Trimble and Takei was a much more anticipated combination. Sometimes I wonder how I get to be so lucky.

Live by the Fist has Trimble as an ex-Navy SEAL who's framed for killing a woman he tried to save from being raped. He's sent to a corrupt Philippine prison, where he befriends George Takei, a kind of wise man leader of the inmates. Takei's trying to contact a human rights group chick to draw attention to inhumane treatment from the warden and guards. Trimble, as you can imagine, is always in trouble, and always has to kick some ass. He kicks plenty until the calvary's called, and he and the human rights group chick can escape.

Now this is what I'm talking about! Amazing! It just frustrates me to know I sit through so much crap, when all DTV directors have to do is watch a gem like this to understand what makes quality cinema. Where do I begin? First fight scene, we hear this amazing electric guitar riff in the background. Think WASP "Blind in Texas" with a little early 80s Crue and mid 80s Dokken mixed in. And that riff plays during every fight scene. And it never gets old. Every time I heard it I did a Tiger Woods hitting a birdie putt at 18 in the Masters to seal the win fist pump.

Trimble shows up here. It's amazing to think I'm just north of 200 posts at the DTVC, and this is the first time a film of his was reviewed. Actually, I found out looking him up on imdb, that that's not exactly true. He was in a gang in Seagal's Today you Die, and I totally missed him because also in that gang was Karo "The Heat" Parisyan. Anyway, this is the first film I've done that he stars in, and I'll have to make sure I do more, because he was the bomb. He has this awesome voice that's like the best parts of Martin Sheen, Joe Estevez, and Judge Mills Lane all mixed together. And he's a very solid martial artist. I can't think of a better guy to root for.

I know you all want to know, and I'll tell you: how awesome was George Takei? Was the voice there? Did he say anything fantastic? The voice was there, but he didn't have any too amazing lines to go with it (not like his trip to Howard Stern's show). His character name is Uncle Coronado, which is probably good enough. I mean, just having Takei is really enough. As long as he's there and talking, the viewer's usually entertained. I'm surprised more DTV film makers-- as in all of them-- don't cast Takei more often. If I made movies, he'd be in all of my films. I'd break the bank to get him, too. If my budget was 2 mill, I'd take out a loan and give him 3. I mean, come on, it's George Takei.

Roger Corman produced this, and that brings up a question I get all the time: why isn't he in the Hall of Fame? Who better to be in a DTV Hall of Fame than one of the creators of the genre? Well, the reason is that before Albert Pyun was inducted last year, only actors were allowed in. Perusing Corman's vast production credits, it looks like he's produced 10-15 movies that have already been reviewed on the DTVC, which would put him second behind Dolph Lundgren for most times tagged. Look for his induction to the HOF this October.

The prison sub-genre of the bad action movie comes up often. When I watched bad action in the 80s and 90s, I'd say one out of five took place in a prison. It's just such an easy way to make a movie: the set's cheap, wardrobe's a cinch, and the plot can be written in a day or two. Unfortunately the (to my eyes, anyway) overrated Shawshank Redemption changed the way we look at prison films. Maybe I don't speak for many people, but I'll take a Live by the Fist over Shawshank any day. The guitar alone makes it for me, but I also think Jerry Trimble is a better actor than Tim Robbins.

Do you even need me to do the last paragraph? You what I'm gonna say. Rent it, buy it, do whatever you have to, but get your hands on this puppy. It's frickin' awesome. It's also only 77 minutes long, which has to be another selling point. Who needs a 3-hour epic, when you can watch this twice in less time.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107430/

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/