Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance (2015)

During my time on hiatus, one of the greatest cult classics ever released a crowdfunded sequel, and when I came off of hiatus, I saw it as a priority to get it up as soon as possible. But then other things got in the way, as there were tons of other films that I needed to make happen in the meantime, so this ended up languishing in the hopper. Well, we're finally making it happen, so let's see if it was worth the wait. Also, our friends Mitch at the Video Vacuum and robotGEEK's Cult Cinema have looked at this, so you can go to their sites to see what they thought.

Samurai Cop 2 takes place about 25 years after the first one. Matt Karedas (Hannon) is called back into action after a Yakuza gang war ignites, and his old partner tracks a series of medallions at the crime scenes to Karedas's forgery (is that the right name for a place that makes things out of metal? Blacksmithery? Mintery?) All the while, there's a mysterious woman who's hooking up with Matt, Bai Ling is acting off the chain, Tommy Wiseau is there, and Joe Estevez and Mel Novak, oh my!

I don't know where to go with this. It's not like the last one where my hang-up over the Bacon Grease Fu made me question what was an otherwise great time. In fact, I had to watch this one twice, because I couldn't believe I didn't love it right away. How could I not like something where Joe is ordering kombucha on a plane? Or a film that has Mel Novak seemingly just to have him? Mel Novak is there for my benefit as a fan of these kinds of movies, and to not like this film felt a little ungrateful. But the issue is something Ty and Brett from Comeuppance Reviews said on a podcast where I brought up this same issue: you can't manufacture a cult classic, and I feel like therein lies the rub. Take the Joe ordering kombucha on a plane scene. At the same time, we have the restaurant concierge from the first one wheeling out a drink cart, and then Bai Ling comes with the dial cranked up to 13, screaming and sending this floating ball into a mass of CGIs, causing a fight scene with more CGIs all over the place, and we're left with a sense that it's all too much. You had me at kombucha, you didn't need the rest.

By the same token, when I get to the credits and I see all of the people who donated getting a thank you from the filmmakers with all of their names listed, there's another part of me that appreciates everything they were trying for here. The best analogy I can come up with is the cheesesteak here in Philadelphia. I like mine with cheese wiz on it, but not all places that make them get how it should be done. Some just slather it on the bun like they're painting a barn, and I don't know that they're doing it that way to be dismissive--some are for sure--, I think they're doing it to be like "you like wiz? I got you man!" The really good ones treat the wiz like they would provolone or American, they put it on the shaved rib-eye while it's on the grill with the onions, so all three meld into something both unctuous, and disastrous for my arteries at the same time. I think this movie slathered on the wiz, instead of doing like they would one with provolone, and the result, despite the best of intentions, was too much. I think if they had played it straight a little more, and let the onions, wiz, and shaved rib-eye come together, that mess of grease, cheese wiz, meat, and carmelized onions on a roll still would have had the punch they wanted, it just wouldn't have felt like too much, so we would've gotten it down better.

Bai Ling is exactly what I'm talking about here. Bai Ling unleashed on 13 with the knob ripped off is too obvious and too much; but Bai Ling on 6, like she was in The Breed or Circle of Pain, and she elevates the material she's working with beyond its limitations, like the budget, but it's still something that we as an audience can still have a lot of fun with. The movie overall felt too much like an everything but the kitchen sink kind of deal, and maybe in some instances you need that, but for a Samurai Cop sequel, we don't need it. Hell, I think you rearrange the plot and make Bai Ling your queen baddie, again, let her play it straight, but still have fun with it. Bai Ling is someone who can pull that off.

I'm all for the classic, buy up everything at the local fetish store, cast some adult actresses, and load up on all the low-budget mainstays you can find--Julie Strain made a great career in films like that, but again, I come back to the fact that, as fun and low-budget as a lot of her movies were, they played it straight. Shane Ryan, Tommy Wiseau, and Lexi Belle can all work, but I think it becomes too much if it's let's be as goofy as possible and not care what happens. Part of what made The Room a cult classic on its own was the fact that Tommy Wiseau was playing it straight. I'm not saying not have fun with it, and I had fun with elements of this, it's just at a certain point this turns from being the funny kid in school to being the kid who jumps on his desk and you're just hoping the teacher will send him to the principal's office; and the thing is, I was pulling for this movie, and it pains me a bit to say it ventured into the latter territory for me.

That begs the question then, what would your Samurai Cop 2 have been? There's a part of me that thinks it should have been a scene by scene remake of part 1 with Bai Ling in Robert Z'Dar's part. Or at least a similar idea to part 1. Use Wiseau and Ryan if you need to, but make them bit parts, like guys Joe has to question for information--or maybe since Ryan does all those exploitation films, he could be the guy Ling has to sneak into the hospital to behead. Get a lot of that green screen and mysticism out of there, go bare bones like the first one, or like a classic AIP actioner. You can still be in on the joke and play it straight. And then maybe incorporate some of the goofiness of this. Maybe Wiseau is a goofball when they need to interrogate him. Maybe Bai Ling has one flip-out scene on her henchwomen--who can still be Gentlemen's Cinema actresses in outfits from the local fetish shop--in fact I think it's even better if they're there and you're playing it straight.

This is a tough no for me, which is different from a hard no, even though tough and hard can mean the same thing, in this case they don't. I wanted to like this, and at moments I did, but overall I think it was played too goofy, and playing it that way didn't work they way it should have. Right now you can stream it on Tubi, and I think that's the best way, that way you'll know if you like it enough to plunk down the cash for the DVD.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3398252

Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan (2013)

I've had this in my Instant queue for sometime now, and last week I noticed our buddy Moe Porne on my Twitter feed talking about it. I asked him to give me his thoughts when he was done, thinking I might review it, and he told me I'd get a kick out of it, so here we are. As an aside, you can catch Moe on his Drunk on VHS podcast hosted by Couch Cutter, a fine site I used to write for from time to time. 

Axe Giant takes place in the Minnesota wilderness, where a boot camp operator takes some troubled teens to rehabilitate them in lieu of a stint in the pen.  Things go from bad to worse though when one of the little brats rips a horn off an ox skull lying on the ground.  Turns out that skull belongs to Babe the Blue Ox, and Paul Bunyan is an enormous twisted man-child with a penchant for murdering people who desecrate Babe's burial ground.  Now everyone is in for it.



This one was pretty fun, but its ending was all over the place, which betrayed the proceedings.  There was one thing I had a real issue with that I'll get into in my last paragraph because it contains spoilers.  It was definitely a low-budget schlockfest that worked both as a time killer and a good bad movie night option until that ending, when it kinda wasn't as much fun anymore.  It definitely had those great low-budget touches though, like I loved that they just took a National Forest ranger office or something, slapped new words over the sign, and passed it off as a juvenile detention center.  And Joe Estevez combined with a scant Dan Haggerty added more laughs.  Paul Bunyan himself was a great baddie, and the idea of making him a horror villain was fun too.  As someone who used to watch Maury, I also appreciated the way they made fun of the drill sergeant in the boot camp episodes.  It had a lot of elements like that that worked, and I think even with the bad ending, it might be fun enough to get you to the church on time.  On the other hand, it's not very remarkable, and with all there is to chose from on Instant, maybe not worth it.

Joe Estevez played the crazy local, and I couldn't figure out what to do with him, but the fact that he was Joe Estevez was enough I guess.  He was playing the stereotypical Southern backwoods crazy, even though he was supposed to be from Minnesota.  It's hard to tell if he was just overacting because he's a D-movie actor, or he was doing a spoof on that character from most horror films.  That's the problem with a lot of modern low-budget horror flicks, they try to have this meta-spoof quality to them that insulates them from criticism, because they can say "oh, we were making fun of that kind of thing, we weren't actually doing it."  The Asylum seems to have made a cottage industry out of that, but theirs often work better.  On the other hand, if you don't trust that Estevez was spoofing old horror flicks, and think he was overacting, you can at least make fun of him.



The Maury boot camp episode has always been the biggest crock to me, and this film really got that right-- which is a reason why I'm inclined to give them a pass on Estevez's character.  I've always seen it as these moron drill sergeants who suffer from a form of Little Man's Syndrome and get off by yelling at defenseless kids.  I remember one when a girl on the show, after being berated by the audience and the drill sergeant while her mom played the innocent victim, said "but my mom is doing drugs with her boyfriend all the time", and the drill sergeant yelled at her "this is about you, not her!"  No, really it's about you being a mental midget Mr. Drill Sergeant, and this movie nailed that with their own drill sergeant, played by Boston's own Thomas Downey.  He was a total jerk to the kids and the counselor, played by Kristina Kopf, who was sent to help the kids.  I kind of wished he'd done it even more, been like the real morons you'd see on Maury, but I guess this was good enough.

If you've been rockin' with me for sometime, you may know I enjoy hiking, and not just any hiking, I like to go up good-sized mountains, hit some steep sections, and really give myself a kick in the pants.  But I'm in good shape, and I enjoy it.  That's why it was funny to see the drill sergeant take the kids on a hike for punishment, and I had to realize that for most Americans, that would be a punishment.  Like the hike I just went on yesterday in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  I had a great time, but it had some long steep sections that would not be a lot of people's idea of fun.  I guess one person's past time is another's punishment.



SPOILER ALERT!!!!   SPOILER ALERT!!!!   SPOILER ALERT!!!!
As I mentioned above, the end of the film was all over the place, and it started with Paul Bunyan killing one of the kids, Rosa, played by Victoria Ramos.  She's developed as an honorable and just character, who has a young daughter that she wants to regain custody of once she's out of the pen.  The kind of character we want to root for, or at the very least, don't want to see die because she has a young daughter.  Of course the film then decides to off her.  Really?  How mean-spirited can you get?  That's just bad form, and ruined an otherwise fun horror flick.  From there it gets worse, when her friend Marty, played by Cliff Williams, is killed by Joe Estevez in a fit of craziness as Estevez tries to stop everyone else from killing Paul Bunyan.  It was just weird and an out of place way to knock off another character.  It just seemed like the film couldn't figure out how to end things, and the ending is the most important part.
END SPOILER!!!!   END SPOILER!!!!   END SPOILER!!!!

So that's it, and we didn't even get into Martin Kove's son Jesse, who plays one of the kids, or Dan Haggerty as a Grizzly Adams type who runs a logging operation up there in the late 19th century.  It's all kind of hit or miss I guess, and while this has its moments, the ending ultimately kills it for me, but you might not have as much trouble with it.  At least it's on Instant, so it's not much of an investment.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1684548/

Guns and Lipstick (1995)

This has been one of those holy grail type films that I've had a fair amount of trouble tracking down, but because it has such an immense cast, I never stopped looking.  Really, it wasn't so much that I had trouble tracking it down, it was that when I did, it was often really expensive.  For instance, my local record store had a used copy for $16.  Can you believe that?  Finally, I bit the bullet and put down $5 plus $3 shipping to get it from Amazon.  Let's see if it was worth it.

Guns and Lipstick has Sally Kirkland as a PI who was wrongly removed from the LAPD.  She has a case protecting Sherrie Rose, but Rose ends up dead anyway, and Captain Robert Forster wants to pin it on Kirkland because she wouldn't date him when she was on the force.  Turns out, Rose had something a lot of people wanted, include crime boss James Hong, his fake daughter Bobbie Phillips, and albino Sonny Landham (no Predators were involved.)  She has her allies though, including Rose's brother Evan Lurie, local bar owner Paul Benedict, and crazy drunk Wings Hauser.  Oh, and Joe Estevez has a small scene too.



This was a story that was all over the place, didn't really know what it wanted to be, could've been cool old school gun shoe thriller with Kirkland great as the lead detective and a great cast of characters around her, but really was just another mystery yarn that felt like it had plot twists for the sake of plot twists, just to add to the run time.  Raymond Chandler this was not.  On the other hand, there is a fun element to fist pumping every time a familiar face popped up on screen, and the 90s elements are in full force, especially the sweet mullets.  Ultimately, I feel like this is really only for completists and people like me who have review sites that focus on movies like this.

I started with Sally Kirkland instead of the film's one DTVC Hall of Famer, because she was the star, and I liked the idea of the classic off-beat detective film led by a woman.  Really, this idea would've worked better as a 90s TV drama, and this movie probably would've worked better as a 42-minute episode, because it's not like Kirkland couldn't have carried this.  She also got to get the hunk, as her and Evan Lurie hooked up.  She was the right person for the role, unfortunately the film didn't hold up its end of the bargain.



Here's Wings playing the piano.  He's not in this much, but when he is, he's pretty great.  Near the end, he ends up in a car with Kirkland, and right away he's just staring out the window with his mouth agape in that trademark Wings style.  He flips out at her earlier in the film in a drunken rage.  One time by the fire, he gives her a massage.  He drinks Seagram's 7 straight from the bottle, then plays the piano and sings some raspy song.  I mean, it's all just Wings-y.  Is this $8 worth of Wings?  Maybe not, but if you're a Wings fan, you'll appreciate what you're seeing.

Let's try to go through everyone else.  Forster is the classic cop heel.  He's always bringing Kirkland in to arrest her, but the charges don't stick.  James Hong is pretty sweet as the crime boss.  Too many of his scenes are covered with smoke, so we can't see him.  Landham as the albino was weird.  You can try to explain to me why that made any sense.  Benedict was funny as the bar owner, I always love seeing him in anything.  Then there was Joe Estevez, who has one scene near the beginning where he sexually harasses Kirkland as he frisks her, then throws her onto her chair.  Not one of his fines moments, but it's Joe Estevez, so it's always fine for us.

This movie was exceedingly mulletous.  We're talking mullets aplenty.  We had full out business in front and party in the back 9.5 in mulletude mullets.  We had skullets.  We had the classic skullet 'stash combo.  We had twin ape drapes among extras leaving a building Kirkland was entering.  The best one was one of Hong's thugs.  It was one of those "oh man, I can't believe you did that!", the "it's awesome" and "it's ridiculous (in the true sense of the word, not the 'a lot' slang sense we often see it as)" at the same time.  If a 90s movie can give you one thing, it's sweet beaver pelts.



Oh... oh what's that?  Evan?  What's that?  Oh, oh no!... oh my God, oh no, what am I... what am I looking at?... Evan please, say it ain't so!  Oh God... Fanny Pack!

I don't think I can write anymore.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0155733/

American Tigers (1996)

In a quest to get more Cynthia Rothrock on the DTVC, we find ourselves here with American Tigers. If you go to her imdb page, this is actually listed under the "Self" section, because she plays herself in it. How bad could it be though? It stars Sam Jones, Donald Gibb, and Joe Estevez-- okay, let me rephrase that, how bad can this be?

American Tigers has Sam Jones as a Major Sergeant that's been railroaded into a desk job by an unscrupulous colonel he served under in Desert Storm (the unfathomably uncredited, awesomely bemulleted Todd Curtis). Turns out that colonel is running a really bad right-wing militia, and the government, i.e. Joe Estevez, wants Jones to round up a troop of soldiers on death row and train them to take out Curtis, his mullet, and his gang. Can they do it?



This had some potential, but ultimately too much of the movie was a bunch of boring crap involving training the recruits. I get that they wanted some kind of redemptive message, but it was boring as all hell, and pretty paint-by-numbers. We have training montages for two reasons: one, to insert some too sweet music into the film; and two, to keep things moving. Had this been kept moving, we would've had more action, and based on the end scene, which was good but not that good, it could've used a lot more. This, unfortunately, is as bad as a movie that's "starring" Sam Jones, Donald Gibb, and Joe Estevez as you'd expect.

If Rothrock wasn't front and center on the cover, I'd have been okay with her small part as herself-- but she is all over the cover, meaning we have ourselves a good ol' fashioned Rothrock bait-and-switch. In American Tigers, as herself, she's friends with the fictional Sam Jones character, and does him a favor by training the recruits. We get some good fights where she beats up the guys, but nothing beyond that. I wonder if she was doing someone a favor by this appearance. Who knows, she's cool, unfortunately just not in the movie enough.



This is our first movie at the DTVC with Sam Jones as the star-- in fact, I believe this is the first Sam Jones movie with him in more than just a couple scenes as a hatchetman--, so this is a change of pace. I won't use this film to judge him, because it really didn't give him a full opportunity to be likable. He makes an excellent drill sergeant, and an excellent commando; estranged husband with a drinking problem, notsomuch. Ultimately, he's at his best with a flat top and leather jacket throwing the lead hero around, eventually getting felled by a chance fall into an electrified fence or something, so he was a little outside his element here.

This movie used one of the most agonizing and tedious devices, the old "key member of the team locked in a shed or closet by the other team and will he or won't he get out in time", which is only a step less annoying than scratching a chalkboard. When Jones's team fought a NavySEALs team to determine who got to take out Curtis and his men, Jones is jumped by a couple of dudes on the SEALs crew and stuffed in a work shed ("workshed!"). We're then treated to a bunch of scenes cut into the fights of Jones pretending to stagger to his feet, breakdown the door, then hack at it with an ax. Why not just get in my face and say "does this bug you? I'm not touching you!", because that was the cinematic equivalent.



So we had a few other names, all underutilized, but all pretty cool. Donald Gibb played a former partner of Jones who now works at a strip club with Jones's estranged wife (she's a waitress, not a dancer). He's Donald Gibb playing Donald Gibb, so you get what you paid for there. Joe Estevez plays a general, and he pops in here and there to tell Jones he's doing a good job or that the Pentagon is riding his ass or something. He's a short mustache away from being Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. Then there's Todd Curtis, he of the amazing mullet, whom you may remember as the baddie in Chain of Command with Michael Dudikoff. Man is he an awesome baddie. The mullet, the cigar, the five o'clock shadow, and in this case, the racist right wing lines. I have no idea why he wasn't credited-- maybe he requested that.

You can get this used on DVD or VHS, but the former is much rarer and more expensive. In either case this isn't worth it unless you can get it for free. If you're a Rothrock completist, this should come at the very end of your journey.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0127417/

Werewolf (1996)

This is one I've been wanting to get after for a long time now. Between the Richard Lynch, the Joe Estevez, and the fact that MST3K has hit it, it seemed like a sure bet. The question was, could I manage it without Mike and the 'Bots first?

Werewolf takes place in Flagstaff, Arizona, where some archaeologists led by Richard Lynch find what looks like a werewolf skeleton. Joe Estevez is one of a few local Native Americans hired by Lynch and his archaeologists-- and physically attacked by his ill-tempered colleague-- and he sees bad things in this skeleton, and he's right when his buddy turns into a werewolf too. Then some dude comes into town, and he's also attacked by Lynch's ill-tempered colleague, getting slashed by the werewolf skull. As you can imagine, he turns into a werewolf too, and all hell breaks loose.



Wow, this is all kinds of bad. Slow moving broken up with some hilarious moments of ineptitude. Not to mention, the main stars after Lynch and Estevez all speak English as a second language, and sound stilted and unnatural when they deliver their lines, making for more unintentionally funny moments. What makes it a tough watch though is the long periods of inactivity. In a group this is something that could probably be handled, and if you can handle it, you'll be rewarded with some amazing stuff, including a werewolf driving a car into some exploding barrels, one of the funniest werewolf horror movie kills in the history of film, and a well proportioned female archaeologist wearing a white tank top with no bra in a chilly pool hall.

That being said, the MST3K version is the definite choice if you're attempting this solo. Think of it like rock climbing-- it's safer to have someone there to hold the rope and guide you through the route, and the MST3K guys are experts. This also had some pretty funny host segments, which wasn't always the case during the late Mike era. The best jokes for me came during the werewolf driving sequence, where they made cracks about him behaving like a dog: "I hope he remembered to crack the window for himself" "He's just going to run around in the back seat while he's driving" [about the traffic lights:] "Hey, I'm color blind!" They also used lycanthrope as a verb, referring to the werewolf transformation as "lycanthroping". Top to bottom an excellent episode.



One of the things that struck me about the MST3K heckling was that they didn't know who Richard Lynch is. In one scene where he had a white sweater on, they joked about how much he looked like a grandmother. It really elucidated the dividing line between what we do and what MST3K does, because, while we both watch bad movies, they do it for a job, and we do it for fun. They have no idea who Richard Lynch is, and they're cool with that; we know exactly who Richard Lynch is, and with a movie like this, seeing his name on the cover is a selling point. Is that a bad thing?

Joe Estevez is only in this at the beginning, and then for whatever reason, he's gone. The hair is fantastic. He must've had other things going on, because he would've been great throughout the film, especially with that hair. The guy does like five or six movies a year, so I wonder if it's a deal where, if a film maker wants him in his or her film, they have to lock him up quick, or he's already committed to like three projects and the best they can hope for is a cameo at the beginning. He has over 215 acting credits on imdb. I wonder if that's a record, and if it isn't, how many he needs to break it.



MST3K brought up a great point about werewolves: they aren't very canine-ish, if you know what I mean. They're more like felines in the things they can do. I mean, how many dogs do you see climb buildings or trees? How about use their claws to attack people? I get that they're supposed to be half human half wolf, but maybe half human half tiger would make more sense. Also, loved the Native American connection to werewolves in this, ten years or so before Twilight.

The stand-alone DVD of this is no longer in print, and can be kind of pricey on Amazon. The VHS is much less so, so that may be the way to go if you're thinking of attacking this without Mike and the 'Bots. The MST3K version, on the other hand, is available on Netflix Watch Instantly, which was how I watched it. I think you're better off letting them do the heavy lifting, but if you and you're friends are looking for a challenge, this could be worth it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118137/

Soultaker (1990)

I first saw this on MST3K, but I don't remember exactly when that was-- late college maybe. At that time, Robert Z'Dar wasn't known as Robert Z'Dar, but rather the dude with the big face from Future War... man have times changed.

Soultaker was written by the lead actress so she'd have a film to star in (so the story goes on MST3K). It stars Joe Estevez ("I don't think anything is ever starring Joe Estevez!") as a Soultaker, a dude who collects one's soul after her or she kicks the bucket. His superior is Robert Z'Dar, and Z'Dar gives him the task of taking the souls of five kids who die in a massive auto accident. Somehow, though, the souls are displaced, and Estevez sees a unique opportunity to live with the soul of one of the girls, because she looks like a woman he dated and killed back in the Old West. Now these kids whose souls are displaced need to escape Estevez and make it back to their bodies before the doctors pull the plug.



According to imdb, this won a Saturn award in 1992. Huh? This was an out-and-out painfest. Beyond being pretty boring, it had all these rules about dying and the afterlife-- that it never followed! When the souls are displaced, Z'Dar tells Estevez that in order to track them he has to "abide by the laws of time and space." Does he? No, he shape-shifts and has shotgun bullets go through him, which in itself was amazing, considering a scene before he was felled by a nine iron blow to the back. It had a few hilarious moments, like one where the mom-- a dissimulated Estevez-- is watching her daughter undress for a bath; or how one of the characters looked like former Chicago Bears QB Jim McMahon (sp?), but those were few and unfortunately far between. Maybe if there were a few more of those, plus more Estevez and Z'Dar and less about the kids, this might have passed for a so-bad-it's-good, but it even failed there.

This was something of a landmark episode for the show, because they brought back TV's Frank and Joel for the host segments. I believe it was also the tenth anniversary. All that did was remind me how much better the host segments were before Joel and Frank left. As far as the actual riffing of the movie went, it was very solid, especially at the end when Servo and Crow went off on a huge rant about how the film should've ended. Nelson always excelled as a straight man in those scenarios, and he was particularly funny in that moment. If anything, the film was very entertaining with their commentary, and very hard to watch without it.



Mike and The 'Bots described DTVC favorite Robert Z'Dar as "a catcher's mitt with eyes." Ouch. He kind of plays a good guy here, and as you can see, he has a thick, blond mullet to boot. On top of that, he has a major voice distortion effect, I guess because he's middle-management in heaven. He's not in the film much, though, which is kind of too bad, and the voice distortion removed one of my favorite Z'Dar acting instruments: how he sounds like a phone sex operator or obscene caller when he tries to blot out his Chicago accent and replace it with sophisticated sounding discourse. "Hey Joe Estevez, what are you wearing?" "Is this Robert Z'dar again?" "[cough cough] Ah no, ha ha, what makes you say that?"

Speaking of Mr. Estevez, I believe this is only his second film we've done. Is that right? Out of 200+ credits, almost all of which are DTVC worthy, the only other one of his I've done is No Code of Conduct, with his brother Martin and his nephew "Charles"? Wow, how is it that 600+ posts here and 200+ films of his have only crossed paths that one (and now a second) time? That has to be some kind of statistical anomaly. At least he's tagged now, and we'll see about getting his ass up here some more-- Christ, 200+ films, that's Hall of Fame territory. He is in a film called Guns and Lipstick that I've been trying like a trooper to get my hands on, but it's always too expensive. In addition to Estevez, it also has Wings Hauser and Evan Lurie.



This car shows up at the very end of the film. Had it been in it more, I bet I would've liked the movie more. What is it, a Caddy or something? I don't know much about cars, but I know enough to say that's pretty awesome. The thing I really wanted to discuss in this paragraph is the tagline about how "there's no stairway to heaven." Forget how silly and cheesy it is, it reminded me of a line my buddy I hike with told me, that expert mountaineers call Denali's West Buttress route the "wheelchair ramp to the summit." I know that's really in bad taste, considering hiking mountains is one of the most apparent joys people confined to wheelchairs aren't able to savor, but it's always freaked me out, because I'll probably never hit Denali someday, but the idea that spending a few weeks on a frozen mountain at such a high altitude could be written off by some as a "wheelchair ramp to the summit", just blows my mind, especially when I think about some of the shit I've done that's kicked my ass and isn't even a fraction of what it takes to do Denali.

All right, we're way off track here, so let's reel me back in. You can get the MST3K version as we speak on Netflix Watch Instantly, and it's plenty worth it. The movie itself is way too expensive from Amazon on DVD (like $50!), but the VHS is around $1, which is like $4 with shipping, which isn't too bad, except you're buying Soultaker sans Mike and The 'Bots, which is pretty painful.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100665/

No Code of Conduct (1998)

I had forgotten this one was in my queue for a while, but when RepoGenetic put in a request for more Mark Dacascos this year, I found it again when I did a search of him on Netflix. The star power alone made this a must see, with the aforementioned Dacascos, Charlie Sheen (as Charles), Martin Sheen, Bret Michaels, and the great Paul Gleason. This just couldn't go wrong, could it?

No Code of Conduct is a tedious crime drama about Charlie (Charles) Sheen as a disgraced cop whose wife doesn't like him and whose dad (Martin), who's also his boss, wants him to get his shit together. One night, while accompanying his partner, Dacascos, doing some vice work, they fall into his dad's drug investigation, when one of the dealers picks up an undercover cop as a prostitute. Now the drug case is blown wide open, and Sheen wants to see it through, while his dad is wondering why his superiors, Paul Gleason and the sheriff from Murder She Wrote, are stonewalling him.



Wow. All that talent, and the best you can do is bore me to sleep for the first forty-five minutes, and barely make up for it with a decent last half-hour. I mean, after the first five minutes, where there's a drug deal gone bad, I'm thinking, this might not be so bad. But suddenly I'm transported into a world of poorly written, endless dialog inundating me with useless backstory and undramatic drama. It just goes to show, you can line up all the acting talent you want, but if the story sucks, you got nothing. Oh, and before I forget, the head baddie was played by the sheriff on Murder She Wrote. Not only that, but the good guys don't take him out, he dies when he's unable to properly back his van out of a parking garage and it explodes. I am not kidding. Even Harold Pinter couldn't make that work, so it wasn't all writing that was wrong with this.

Of course, at the DTVC, we work hard to dispel the myth that bad writing makes for a bad movie experience. We frequently showcase films with zero acting, directing, or writing talent, and we frequently extol the virtues of those films. That's because the people who make the ones we like know their shortcomings, and make up for it with plenty of mindless action, or ridiculous gore. That first forty-five minutes in No Code of Conduct that bored me to death could've been scrapped and made into some great action scenes. You've got a great talent like Mark Dacascos, why not have him and Sheen get into a bar room brawl? You can tell me all you want that that kind of thing happens in every bad action film, but you didn't do any better-- in fact you did worse, because you just made a bad action film with no action, which is even worse.



So I have to apologize to RepoGenetic for this first Dacascos effort of 2010, because he's completely wasted here. I just don't even know why you cast Dacascos--I don't care if he's doing you a solid or helping out a bud in their independent production-- if you don't utilize his strengths. One of the baddies showed some knife skills early on, why not have him fight it out with Dacascos, instead of they way they killed him, by running him over. Just another way this film was totally sautéed in wrong sauce.

In watching this, I have to re-imagine the world as it was in 1998. Martin Sheen was a year away from The West Wing, Charlie (Charles) Sheen was two years from taking over for Michael J. Fox in Spin City, and five from Two and a Half Men being the hit that would bring him Hanes commercials with Michael Jordan and what not. Even Bret Michaels was still trying to make sense of a world post Hair metal, as Rock of Love was still a long ways off. It just shows how quickly one can be done and come back. I mean, Charlie Sheen had resorted to calling himself "Charles", how hilarious is that?



I forgot to capture an image of Joe Estevez. He was great. He played some guy named Pappy, was overweight, and had these stubby little fingers. More than anything, he looked like disgraced former Texas Tech head coach Mike Leach. I'd love to see a biopic about Mike Leach made with Estevez in the lead role. You could really play some of the better angles of the story, like Leach's obsession with pirates, or his press conference where he said his players needed to stop listening to their "fat little girlfriends". The question, of course, is whether or not Joe Estevez would have time for a movie like that. Since this came out, he's been in 97 movies, including 13 that are still in various stages of development.

This does not live up to the star power it advertises. A decent last twenty to thirty in no way makes up for an excruciating first forty-five. Poorly written, no good action to make up for it, a total waste of Mark Dacascos' talent, and the hilarious casting decision of the sheriff from Murder She Wrote as the baddie, adds up to a whole lot of bad.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131502/