The Mark: Redemption (2013)

This weekend is Gary Daniels's birthday, and considering we haven't reviewed anything of his since we did The Gardiner in 2024, I figured I'd dip back into the religious film pool and do another of the three religious movies he did, which is a sequel to he first one we covered about 13 years ago. Will being a Daniels completist have me questioning my life choices?

The Mark: Redemption picks up where the first one left off, with Craig Sheffer and Sonia Couling awkwardly parachuting out of a plane in front of some poorly done greenscreen. The Rapture is still happening, as the priest from Ireland who fell off his horse in the 1800s predicted it would, complete with an antichrist who wants one world government called "The New World Order" and wants people implanted with tracking chips--the same chip Sheffer's got in him. So this antichrist sends Daniels out to get him, but to know where to find him, he needs to beat up a tied-to-a-chair Eric Roberts first. Oh by the way, there's trafficking too! We just need an ad telling us to buy gold, and some sea moss pills, and we'll have completed our Alex Jones bingo card.

When I did the first one of these back in 2013, I said I wouldn't make fun of the religious aspects, because I was the one treading on their turf to review a Gary Daniels movie. That said, as you saw in my synopsis, this isn't just religious, it's that intersectionality of White Nationalism and Christian Fundamentalism that's much more insidious than simple religion. When I was on the Red Dawn episode of the Exploding Helicopter podcast, I said if someone were creating a White Nationalist group, Red Dawn would be the first movie night in the recruitment process. This movie is more like two weeks in, you got the heads shaved, the swastikas tattooed on the biceps, but maybe there's some doubt creeping in as the recruits are feeling isolated in your compound in Northern Idaho, you throw this on and start yelling "this is what we're fighting against right here!"--the one world government, nationalizing industries, tracking chips in people, and whatever else you have on your alt right bingo card--and by the end of the 90s minutes those brains are fully washed again. Does this have any value beyond that? Daniels is kind of fun, Wych Kaos is the cinematographer, and Thai film mainstay Sahajak Boonthanakit is great in his small part. But even as a Daniels completist like me, I found myself questioning my life choices while watching this.

We are officially at 61 movies for Gary Daniels though, so maybe it was worth it. And as I said above, he turns in a fun performance. I don't know if he's rubber stamping the ideas in this movie, or he just needed a paycheck--or even more, maybe the coded language of things like "New World Order" weren't familiar to him. It's one thing to be religious, but the Alex Jones conspiracy stuff is another level. We have one more of these overt religious films of his left to do, The Encounter: Paradise Lost, and then there's one more he made in Thailand at that time, A Stranger in Paradise, that I've been trying to track down as well. Maybe I'll wait until I've tracked down that second one before I dive back in and do that last religious movie after how this one went. From there, it looks like he has his first movie since 2022's Repeater coming out soon, Lion Fist, so I'll be excited to check that out. While he's no threat to catch Dolph for most ever tags as an actor (and most ever overall), the next closest actor to him is Cynthia Rothrock with 47, and with a lot of her films not seeing releases lately, I don't see her catching Daniels for second anytime soon either.

As you're reading my review of this, you might be asking, "is it really worth it to say you've reviewed all of Gary Daniels DTV films?" The same question comes up when I mention needing to review Fat Slags for Dolph, people have been warning me off that one, but I have to do it at some point. But is it worth it? At the time as I'm watching something like this, as Craig Sheffer is talking about "Age of Accountability," or tells Sonia Cooling "you look hot in my mom's clothes," there is a sense that I'm making questionable life choices, and perhaps there's an Italian-directed 80s 'Namsploitation film shot in the Philippines I could be watching instead, or hell, maybe I could just rewatch Recoil on Tubi. On the other hand, to be able to say "I've watched and reviewed 61 Gary Daniels movies," it feels like I did something. What that something was, I don't know, but I did it. Now there are some limits to this. For example, Dolph was slated to star in a Kevin Spacey movie, and if that gets released I won't be doing that. But Fat Slags, that we'll eventually have to make happen.

The guys at Comeuppance talk about the "Sit-down Role," which is when an actor spends the bulk of the film just sitting. The best example is Dick Van Patten in A Dangerous Place, where his character is called "Principal," he never leaves his office, and the only thing that keeps his role from being entirely sit-down is when decorum dictates that he needs to stand when Erin Gray enters his office to discuss her son, Ted Jan Roberts. In this film, Eric Roberts is back in what is also almost a complete Sit-down Role, as the only time he's not sitting is when Gary Daniels moves him from one chair he's tied to to another. And the tied-to-a-chair seems to be the new bastion of the Sit-down Role, as we saw it a lot in the Bruce Willis Randall Scandals. It's like the film is saying "the guy has to be sitting if he's tied to a chair, right?" I don't know if Roberts went all the way to Thailand to sit in a chair and get punched in the face and talk about God, it's possible he shot his scenes in LA, but there's no way of knowing from IMDb alone, considering by my count he did 38 movies in 2013! Of the almost 900 credits he has on IMDb, this is the 18th film we've covered here, which I imagine isn't something a lot of people would've guessed, that Gary Daniels has over three times the movies Eric Roberts has on the DTVC, but when you look at his films, a lot of them don't belong on here, and I generally don't seek him out specifically, he just happens to be in something I'm reviewing for someone else, like another Gary Daniels movie he did, A Hitman in London aka Skin Traffik, which would've been another complete Roberts Sit-down Role--this time behind a desk using the phone--if not for a scene at an airplane hanger at the end. I guess it was a matter of "you need to fly home anyway, want to shoot a scene while you're here?" Maybe someday we'll accrue enough Roberts Sit-down Roles for him to get into the Hall of Fame.

Finally, I wanted to use this last paragraph to shout out a podcast I love that closed-up shop recently, Knowledge Fight. If you're not familiar with them, the show would make fun of and breakdown the lies and inconsistencies in Alex Jones's Info Wars show--"Knowledge Fight" being a play on the name "Info Wars." What I loved about it, was its hosts Dan and Jordan went beyond the click-baity aggregated clips and got into the heart of how the Alex Jones grift really worked, and I think because they were so good at pulling back the curtain, Jones never mentioned them, and it was understood that none of his other hosts could mention them either. When the news came that the Onion had found a new way to get Info Wars from Alex, at first I was excited, until I realized that they still needed a judge's approval--which they didn't get--and then found out they didn't include the Knowledge Fight guys at all. It led to Jordan doing a Twitch rant where he went scorched earth on the Onion, the aftermath of which ultimately led to Dan and Jordan ending the show; but I think it was a missed opportunity for the Onion to leave them out. To be able to air the show that debunked Alex Jones's grift on the Info Wars platform would've done more to hurt Jones's brand than Tim Heidecker doing an impression of him. Jones can do a shirtless rant about Heidecker being a Satanist or whatever, but he can't come at the Knowledge Fight guys for pointing out how Jones never really read an article he was saying proved his point about some conspiracy bullshit he's going on about, because if his listeners saw that they'd start to question things and stop buying supplements. Anyway, my Monday and Friday mornings aren't going to be the same without the Knowledge Fight guys there making fun of Right Wing grifters. Here's to you Dan and Jordan, you're two of the great ones.

And with that let's wrap this up. You can get this free on Tubi, but the question is, do you want to? How big of a Gary Daniels completist are you? I'm not asking this rhetorically, I'm saying if you're considering it, take a walk, clear your mind, and really think about how much of a Gary Daniels completist you are. I probably should've taken my own advice.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2563562/

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

Savage Dog (2017)

When I had Simon from Explosive Action on the pod to discuss Avengement, he had this right up there as another favorite Adkins flick of his. Hearing that I knew I had to make this happen. In addition to us, our friends Ty and Brett at Comeuppance Reviews, and Mitch at the Video Vacuum have looked at this, so you can go to their sites to see what they thought.

Savage Dog takes place in 1950s French Indochina (which might make the title Chien Savage?), where Scott Adkins is a prisoner forced to fight other prisoners by an evil Nazi warden (Vladimir Kulich, who played Tommy in the Debt Collector films--though not taking any cream off the vig in this one). When he gets his release, he goes to work at Keith David's bar, where he meets JuJu Chen and falls in love with her. To make extra cash, he fights in the Nazi warden's underground fight club, which, as you can imagine, doesn't end well. This is all in the first half of the movie. In the second half, Adkins is unleashed on a revenge quest against the Nazi warden and his crew.

As we were discussing Avengement more, Simon decided he preferred it to Savage Dog, but he was torn. For me, I wasn't torn, I liked Avengement more than this, but that doesn't mean this wasn't fantastic either. I think the beginning of this is a bit more of a slow burner--not without its moments though--but then it goes ape shit. Avengement is ape shit from the beginning, and just gives us breathers from time to time to collect ourselves. But man, when this get kicks it into that next gear, it really gets there. When it is slower at the beginning though, we have performances by Adkins, Chen, David, and Kulich; plus, among Kulich's gang are Cung Le and Marko Zaror, so the slower opening is really just preparing us for Adkins's eventual fights with both, which don't disappoint. In their review on Comeuppance, Ty and Brett were saying that this is one of those few modern DTV flicks that meets the standard set by those great DTV flicks of the 80s and 90s, and I agree with them on that. Adkins and Jesse V. Johnson have done it again.

Recently Adkins was on our friend Jon Cross's Booth Talk podcast (which if you aren't subscribed you really should be!) to discuss his latest film, Legacy of Lies, and on that one he mentions that people doubt his acting ability. First off, if that were true then neither Debt Collector would have worked, because part of the charm of that is his interplay with Louis Mandylor; but also, here he has many scenes with Keith David, who's an excellent actor, and he holds his own in all of them. While we don't come to an Adkins action film for his acting, we're coming for his explosive, high-octane martial arts, if he couldn't act these films wouldn't quite be what they are, so he does deserve credit for that. I don't know that anyone is killing it the way Adkins is right now, and it's exciting to see him get after it in film after film. This is just another we can add to that great list.

I recently watched Wu Assassins on Netflix, and while the show itself fell into the classic Netflix show trap where I feel like I'm watching a 10-hour movie and I get burned out, JuJu Chen was amazing in it as the Triad enforcer for Byron Mann's character. We talk about Adkins getting after it, but Chen really got after it in that show, and it's a shame we didn't see any of that here. Just the same, she turns in a great performance alongside Adkins, and it works for what it was; but one fight scene would have been great too. She did a film recently with Luke Goss called Hollow Point, where not only does she get to fight, but Luke Goss doesn't affect an American accent, so that's definitely on the list to check out once it's available.

This is our seventh Keith David film on the site, and like those others, he doesn't disappoint. I think the thing with him is, he's usually not the lead, and I usually don't seek out films for him specifically, but if I'm torn between a couple films, and he's in the cast of one, it's definitely a selling point that will lean me in that film's direction. One aspect I thought they did really well with here too is they leaned on his great voice work by having him be the narrator as well as part of the cast. Another film we did with him in it, Dirty, didn't make the same choice, instead opting for another cast member to do it, and the film suffered. Here's to you Keith David, you're one of the great ones.

Finally, this film features Cung Le and Marko Zaror, two excellent fighters that we can't wait to see Adkins get after it with. For me, this is part of what makes Jesse V. Johnson so great in the action realm right now, because the temptation is probably to have Adkins fight either or both of them sooner in the film, and he ignored that and left it until the end. It's a lot of trust in the audience, because that first half isn't as action-packed as the second, and with all the options at our fingertips on streaming sites, if we're bored we'll find something else. There was just enough there in that first half for me to keep me watching, and I was rewarded with the payoff of two great scenes, one each with Le and Zaror--plus so many other great scenes as Adkins was unleashed on his road to revenge.

And that's as good a note to end this on as any. I put this right behind Avengement on my list of Adkins/Johnson collaborations, right above Accident Man. To go back to my mention of the Comeuppance review, this is the action that will keep you from saying "man, they just don't make them like they did in the 80s and 90s"--at least for 90 minutes.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5851014

Death Fighter (2017)

This one has been on my radar since I came back from hiatus. Always looking to do more Wilson and Rothrock, I was intrigued; on the other hand, after the scant part they both had in Showdown in Manila, I was also worried that we wouldn't get much of them here. I guess there's only one way to know how it is, and that's diving in, so without any further ado...

Death Fighter has Matt Mullins as a cop whose mentor, Joe Lewis, is killed in a bust gone bad. Now he wants revenge, so he goes to ex-mercenary Don "The Dragon" Wilson for help. So he, Wilson, and Wilson's silent partner Otto, load up the gear and head into the jungle for their revenge. At the same time, they come across a makeshift hospital, and the woman there tells them about the slave trade this baddie has been running. So we have drugs, slave trades, and jungles. What more could we want? Maybe a Rothrock-Wilson fight?...

I think this was a set up to showcase some up-and-coming talent alongside names we already know, so the question is, how well did it work? Part of the problem is, this is a heavy-duty Jungle Slog, and while the movie may have been fun for Wilson to make (see his comments on the IMDb page), for us watching it, we don't get to see the fun behind-the-scenes stuff he got to enjoy. In fact, for us movie geeks, that probably would have been more fun for us too. It wasn't all bad, the martial arts were fantastic, especially with Mullins, Jawad El Berni, Chiranan Manochaem, and Prasit Suanphaka, they were all in high-level scenes that showed how well they could get after it; plus Wilson and Rothrock were no slouches in their scenes either; the problem is, the modern Jungle Slog is hard to pull off without any of the charm of the late 80s/early 90s, and this suffered from that.

When we last saw Wilson, it was in a tiny part in Showdown in Manila. This is a much beefier role, which helped. The other thing was seeing him cast opposite Mullins, his experience onscreen was really pronounced. Before the Showdown in Manila post, we last saw him in 2011, and part of the reason for that break was he went on his own hiatus in '07, and didn't do another feature film until 2015's Scorpion King 4 (which I haven't seen yet, and am not sure I will, considering it comes in at a whopping 105-minute runtime. Are you serious?). Now he's got tons of stuff out there that I need to catch up on. If it's more this movie than Showdown in Manila, I'll take and am excited to get after it. He's not just a Hall of Famer, he's a member of the 30 Club and one of the best to ever do it, and it was nice to see a film like this where that was well represented.

Our film's other Hall of Famer and member of the 30 Club, Cynthia Rothrock, plays the main baddie's number one hatchet person. As you can imagine, that didn't work at all. When have we ever seen Rothrock in a role where she takes orders? Call it a trope, or a standard movie convention, but we almost never see women as main baddies unless the hero is a woman too. Why does that have to be the case? Rothrock as the main baddie would have been absolutely killer in this. The same barriers that kept movie houses from wanting to cast her as the lead, are here and preventing her from being the top baddie as well. For once I'd love to see a movie take a chance like that, and there's no one better-suited to take that chance with than Rothrock.

What's one of the worst things you can say about a talent in the DTV action realm? To me, it's "I don't understand the concept of [x person]." For example, I personally don't understand the concept of either Vince Murdocco or Ian Jacklin. Many people in this blogging sphere are fans of both though, right? On the other hand, many of my fellow bloggers can't understand the concept of Loren Avedon, and I'm a fan of him. Compare that to Don "The Dragon" Wilson or Cynthia Rothrock. Have you ever heard anyone say that about them? Right, and look where they are. My point is, Matt Mullins is on the edge of those two territories, and I think the thing that will ultimately keep him out of the former is the filmmakers he's working with not putting him in bad situations. High-octane fight scene where he's taking out multiple baddies? Great situation. The image below where he looks like a kid whose mom woke him up at 2pm and is making him clean his room? Bad situation. I don't want to be saying "I don't understand the concept of Matt Mullins," I want to be saying "I can't wait for that next Matt Mullins flick to come out."

And that's the thing, when you pair Mullins with Jawed El Berni, you have some explosive new talent where I'm excited to see what they have next for us. Their fight delivered everything you'd want from it. When we think of who's next, Scott Adkins is at the top of the list. I don't know where you put Michael Jai White, because he's closer in age to Gary Daniels than he is Adkins, so he may not be next wave as much as current wave. Tony Jaa and Iko Uwais are two other names; and then Natalie Burn is another who can bring it. I put these two right up there with them. I get that they don't have the names some of those others do, so maybe they couldn't carry their own two cops on the edge buddy picture set in Eastern Europe without another name on the cover, but it would be cool to see. Maybe you cast Rothrock as the baddie for that for the name recognition.

We made it to paragraph number 8 quick. Right now you can get this on Prime, so if you have Prime, it's worth checking out. I'd like to see it move to Tubi so everyone can get it for free. For a Jungle Slog, there are some great fights that are worth watching, but it's too much of a Jungle Slog for me to suggest paying for it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3724490

Ninja II aka Ninja: Shadow of a Tear (2013)

This is a movie that I'd been looking to get to for some time, so when I started doing the DTVC podcast with Jamie, I saw this as a great opportunity to make it happen. On this episode we also had long time friend of the site Karl Brezdin at Fist of the B-List, who has a great site and was a great contributor to the pod. Speaking of friends of the site, our friend Mitch at The Video Vacuum also covered this, so you can go there to see what he thought of this flick.

Ninja II is a sequel to the first Ninja, where Isaac Florentine and Scott Adkins team up again to give us 90 minutes of pure awesome. Adkins's wife, Mika Hijii, is killed by a bad person, and Adkins naturally wants revenge. His revenge leads him to Thailand and the ninja dojo of friend Kane Kosugi. Turns out these killers are linked to a drug ring operating out of Myanmar run by Shun Sugata, which is where our ninja is headed to take care of business so bad that Myanmar is knocked back to being called Burma.

As I said, this is 90 minutes of pure awesome. Jamie loved it so much she watched it twice and put that pic of Adkins from the film beheading the baddie as her Facebook banner. All the complaints I made about the first one were erased. We had no Adkins running away, we had all Adkins as a bad ass performing in great fight scene after great fight scene. There is no shaky cam here, no special effects cheating, just good ol' fashioned well choreographed and well performed martial arts battles. For my money, this is one of the few modern flicks that can take the Pepsi Challenge with any of the greats from the 80s and 90s.

Let's start with Mr. Adkins, because he was perfect in the lead, and perfect as all of our new celebrity crushes. Jamie loved him, and you can see why. He's someone who grew up in the 80s like the rest of us, loving the films we love, and as such he brings that kind of commitment to the role, which comes out in the final project. When talking about who might be the head of the next wave to take over after the old guard retires (or we get sick of them!), Scott Adkins needs to be at the top of the list with Michael Jai White. The one thing I think we do need more of though: Adkins with his natural English accent.

Isaac Florentine has been directing great martial arts actions films for some time now, and seeing this I was reminded of just how important he is in keeping DTV action films the way we want them: good fights, well-choreographed and well-shot, and not a pile of shaky cam where we can't see and which is covering up for substandard fight scenes. Isaac Florentine, like Adkins, is a fan of martial arts films, in particular Hong Kong films from the 70s, and that shows in the way his films are done. We need to show these studios that we need more legit directors like Isaac Florentine, Albert Pyun, and John Hyams making these films; that it's not good enough to just throw a stuntman or set designer in for his or her first ever directorial debut, nor good enough to go in after the director is finished and edit the hell out of it. We need to speak with our wallets and support more Ninja IIs.

I want to go back to the discussion on Adkins being the next guard, and really overall the future of the action genre, not only in the DTV world, but also on the big screen. Since the Bourne Identity, where deft split-second edits were used to turn Matt Damon into an action lead, action films have been following suit, making action stars out of non-action folk, most notably now Liam Neeson; but also has allowed older action stars like Steven Seagal and Sylvester Stallone a longer action film shelf life.  How does a Scott Adkins break into the mainstream in this environment? He gets a part as the baddie's number 1 henchman in Expendables 2, and that's about the extent of it. Is DTV and Isaac Florentine flicks the best we can do? And on some levels, is that maybe better? I don't know, I think we need to get to a point where we're not just rumoring about Scott Adkins as Batman, but it's a reality.

Among the other stars in the film, as I mentioned above Mika Hijii returns to reprise her role from part 1. It's a very small part, and she gets most of her screen time in flashbacks. I have a hunch that if there's a third one, she'll be back, having used some kind of ninja magic to fake her death. You can't keep Mika Hijii away that long. As we mentioned above, Kane Kosugi plays Adkins's buddy. He's fantastic as well, and like many actions fans, we've been rockin' with him for a long time, since he (and we) were very young in the early 80s and he was in his father, Sho Kosugi's, films. When talking about Adkins potentially heading the next class of action stars to take over from the old guard, you need to put Kane Kosugi in there as well. His final scene with Adkins was spectacular. Finally, the great Shun Sugata plays the main baddie, and he's fantastic as well. Among the 100-plus films to his credit, the only other one we've done here is Bunraku, but I'm sure readers will know him for a variety of other things, from The Last Samurai to Kill Bill and Ichi the Killer.

Is there any question about where I'm going on this one? It's a must, especially now while it's on Instant. This is one of the best action films, DTV or otherwise, in the past ten years or so. Go check it out, or if you're like Jamie, you can go see it again, it's that good. I want to thank Karl again for coming on the podcast. Remember, you can check him out at Fist of the B-List. And as far as our podcast goes, subscribe on your favorite podcatcher, of follow the links in the sidebar.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2458106/

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/