Realm of Shadows (2024)

This is another film producer Joe Williamson asked us to review, a horror anthology from writer/director/actor Jimmy Drain, featuring names like Mel Novak, Tony Todd, Vernon Wells, Richard Tyson, and Harley Wallen, a director we usually see when Joe sends us a screener, but here appears in a cameo at the end. Let's see how this one did.

Realm of Shadows is less an anthology and more a collection of short films made my Jimmy Drain, many of which feature him as the male lead. They deal with issues like witches who are feminists (haven't seen that trope before!), women who get impregnated by warlocks (sans Mia farrow and John Cassavetes), and spells to make women have sex with guys (a little on the rape-y side post-Cosby). Around these short films we have a group of witches trying to get a dagger, and using a Ouija board to get it. Suddenly at the end, Tony Todd shows up, Vernon Wells reveals himself to be leading the witches, and Harley Wallen and Richard Tyson look like witch hunters ready to take down the dagger witches. And then the movie ends.

And that's the movie. The most interesting and most exciting stuff all comes at the end. I can't knock it though, if I were Jimmy Drain, it sounds like a great idea: package all my short films, then get some big names to do some small scenes around them, and voila you're swimming in Tubi streams. I think the problem I had with this compared to other anthologies Joe has had us look at, is those ones were collections of short films all with similar themes, and all done by different directors, so we get unique voices and performances, which is something we needed here. The other thing is I think some of the stories had issues. Again, we probably never should've done the "spell cast to make a girl like you" paradigm, because it always had overtones of foregoing consent, but post-Cosby it should be totally off the table--though to be fair to Mr. Drain, the cellphone his character has looks like something out of 2008, so maybe he made it pre-Cosby? Also, the loaded trope of the feminists who are really just man-hating witches is also both dated and probably never should've been a thing to begin with. There were a couple shorts that were done more like silent films--perhaps because the audio was bad when they recorded them?--and while I liked that idea, we needed some inter-titles to know what was going on. I'm all for people making it happen in a creative field, and Jimmy Drain's short films here are no different; but I think overall, I just could've used a bit more from the stories, and more of the great stuff at the end.

My number one performance was Tony Todd, who I love anyway. This is now 7 films for him on the site, perhaps the most memorable being his turn as a baddie in Sabotage, but even here, he's just another level in the few scenes he's in. We have two names that are hitting their 12th film on the site, Mel Novak and Vernon Wells. Novak of course is a mainstay in the films Joe asks us to review, and he's always a lot of fun, playing a priest in the bumpers between shorts, who's then later revealed to be buddies with Tony Todd. That's the movie I need, those two as priests vanquishing evil. And perhaps that evil could be in the form of baddie Vernon Wells, who in this just appears at the end when he's revealed to be the one directing the witches coven seeking the dagger. It's always great to see these guys in movies, and despite having scant roles here, it was no less great to see them.

Often when I'm reviewing a movie, I pick my favorite supporting character, and here I had a clear winner. Look at how great that guy above is. He's either a priest, or he's selling beers in the stands at a baseball game, or he's a transient short order cook who may or may not have a rap sheet and who may or may not occasionally sleep out of his Chevy Ranger as he's traveling the country, starting over in a new city after he's worn out his welcome in the last one. As a priest he's telling Jimmy Drain--who I guess in this short is a college professor, or a grad student teaching English classes?--not to succumb to temptation when one of his students wants to hook up with him. What Drain apparently cuts out is our priest asking Drain after for $20 to float him through to payday. I don't know who he is, because his picture isn't on IMDb, and with these being shorts, characters were in and out so fast it was hard to know who anyone was--and I have a hunch the no image on IMDb is by design, the last thing he needs is the landlord in Des Moines that he skipped out on finding out where he is, or that guy in Poughkeepsie that he owes $500 to. Either way, here's to you this guy, you were fantastic.

Jimmy! Jimm-May! I love that the creative force behind these films isn't James Drain or Jim Drain, but Jimmy Drain. "Who do you put your bets in with?" "Jimmy the Drain over on 2nd and Wolf. They call him 'the Drain' because all your money goes down the drain with him!" Being of part-Irish decent, I've had family members call me "Matty" before, the same way my late grandfather was a "Jimmy," so not only I can appreciate it, I like that he's embracing it. I can also appreciate that he had all these short films, and he wanted to package them into something that can make him money. The problem was, the best stuff came with his bumpers and the final denouement, which I think made the shorts look worse by comparison. I hope he makes that second movie that the end of this one teases, because I think it could be really good. While I appreciate why he packaged all his shorts into this film, I'm rooting for him to make it happen with more full-length features.

Finally, look at that phone. I think I last had one like that in 2012. After that I got my brother's iPhone 4, and have been using iPhones ever since, going from that to my wife's i6, which I broke, forcing me to get the SE I have now. My dad has never been up on technology, but he finally had to get a flip phone when my mom got rid of their landline. He was saying how he never uses it, and I tried to explain to him how much I use mine for. The obvious one is texting, but it's not just phone texting, but messaging on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X. I use Apple Pay to make almost all of my purchases, plus I can ride the subway or the bus here in Philadelphia with Apple Pay, along with the subways/buses in New York, Boston, and Chicago. That means in those cities, I don't need to bother with getting a subway pass or ticket. My train tickets and plane tickets are on my phone, along with any sporting events I attend. If I'm lost, I can open my phone and find out where I am so I don't need to ask strangers for help. There's also the bad, like how I have all my work apps on my phone too, so I can see off hours when someone is pinging me--but even that can also be a good thing, because I can step away from the computer during work hours and still be available if someone needs me for something. Seeing that old phone made me a bit nostalgic, and there was maybe a romantic sense hearkening back to a simpler time, but how much better was that simpler time? Needing to get tokens or have a unique card for every city I went to to ride their subway? Making sure I had my plane ticket and boarding pass, and didn't lose them? I remember my friend forgetting our tickets to Gwar and realizing it when we were three hours from our dorm at UMaine. He had to buy us all new tickets when we got to the show in Worcester. Now he'd have the tickets on his phone--unless he still has a phone like that one.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi here in the States. While it has some moments, the thing I really want to see is the next movie that's teased at the end. By the same token, I'm always a proponent of supporting indie filmmakers, and you can support Jimmy Drain by just streaming this. It's a nice use of 90 minutes of your time, and you may find yourself enjoying some of the stories.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10619392

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/

Ash and Bone (2022)

For February's indie review, producer Joe Williamson came to me to see if I'd review this film for the site, and though it didn't look like the kind of film I usually do for the DTVC, I figured I'd give it a shot to help get the word out on another independent film. It was directed by Harley Wallen, whose work we last looked at when we did Abstruse with Tom Sizemore back in 2020, so we were probably overdue to review another one of his too.

Ash and Bone stars Angelina Danielle Cama as Cassie, a troubled teen whose father (Wallen) and his girlfriend (Kaiti Wallen) take her to a cabin his family has in rural Michigan to get her away from the trouble she's in. The problem is, Cassie has a way of finding trouble wherever she goes, and this time she meets a young couple at a local bar and convinces them to break into a scary farm house owned by a scary brother and sister who may or may not be kidnapping and torturing young women at their place. Spoiler alert: they are, and when they get home they find Cassie and her new friends there. They escape, but the brother and sister won't let this go so easily. Like Q bringing the Enterprise in contact with the Borg, Cassie has set in motion a season finale cliff hanger of epic proportions.

Out of the three films of Wallen's we've covered here now, this one works the best for me. Yes, the end meandered a bit, but considering his films usually clock in at 100+ minutes at a minimum, and sometimes close in on two hours, this one at 97 minutes had a leaner feel that really worked in its favor. From there, Wallen with his cinematographer Alex Gasparetto do a great job framing scenes and individual shots--something that I thought he could've leaned on more in Abstruse he really does a great job of here. We also get great performances, a few standouts for me included Cama as Cassie, Wallen as the naive, affluent city-dweller dad, Erika Hoveland as the sister of the serial killer siblings, and then Jamie Bernadette as the local cigarette smoking young woman who seems like she's already been beaten down by this isolated small town. Finally, I'll need to get into some spoilers, so be warned if you read further that I'll be giving away the film, but getting into Bret Miller's story, I liked the way we're given Cassie as a sympathetic figure to start, but as it goes on, we see that she's the cause of a lot of destruction in the lives of the people she comes into contact with. Without that, this feels like a two-part episode of a CBS procedural like Criminal Minds, which wouldn't have been horrible, but I liked the ambiguity Cassie's role gave us. Also, the fact that most of the victims are in some way complicit in their own demise: Cassie's friend Tina (Calhoun Koenig) doesn't need to jump in the stolen police car with Cassie, but she does; her dad didn't want to believe his daughter was the bad influence, but if he had, they wouldn't have gone to that remote Michigan town; and the young couple could have told Cassie no when she said she wanted to break into the scary farm house. They all let Cassie manipulate them, with disastrous results. It took what I thought was going to be a scary slasher film and made it something more.

Harley Wallen definitely embodies the independent spirit of movie making, which I really appreciate, and which really comes through in this. I think the big difference between his films and some of the other indie films we look at is length. Motern Media's films usually clock in around 88 minutes. Shogun's around 90. Cinema Epoch/Cineridge's even shorter, with ones in the 75-minute range. When I see a Wallen film on Tubi and it's 105-minutes to potentially closing in on 120, it's a bigger investment--like Abstruse, which was 117 minutes. Part of the reason why I think his films tend to go longer though, is he has a message in them he wants to deliver, and he doesn't want to lose any part of that message. I get that, and I respect it, but where I think this movie worked better for me, was the messages here were more under the surface for me to take with me after I've thought about it more. One big one that he used in both Abstruse and Eternal Code, is the idea that in our society some lives are worth more than others, but in those films it was more the main driver of those stories, while here it was underneath the surface of a tense horror thriller. It's like you get this relief that Wallen's character and his family survive, but what about all the poor girls that didn't? Or that the thing that caused the serial killing siblings' downfall was that they attacked some rich people from the city, but then you as the viewer have to juxtapose that on your own with the idea that they were okay killing girls who were runaways, those girls probably escaping something horrible at home only to end up dying a horrible death. You don't get that in your usual slasher, so it was a welcome surprise to have that kind of depth.

We're now at 11 Mel Novak films on the site. Here he plays the owner of a local bar, and while the role is scant, it has that vibe of the impartial observer who doesn't get involved in the town's business, but he has a sense of what's going on. I think for what this role was, it enhanced the film enough, gave it that little extra that an indie flick like this would want by having him in this part. We actually haven't seen him since 2020's review of An Hour to Kill, another one that producer Joe Williamson asked us to cover. In looking at Novak's IMDb bio, while probably more of his newer stuff will probably only come to us through further review requests, he also has some stuff from the 90s and early 2000s that we haven't hit yet either, so this isn't the last we've seen of him here. He kind of fits that Charles Napier/Richard Lynch category, where we don't necessarily seek his films out, but he stars with enough people that we do seek out, that we end up seeing him enough on here--and to further the comp, Lynch has 13 tags, and Napes 12, so Novak's 11 is right in line with them.

Another twist for me was how, what starts out as your usual "who wants to see some pretty women get killed in horrible ways" kind of film, turns into almost a female empowerment movie. The male characters reveal themselves to be the weaker ones, whether it's Tucker (Mason Heidger), the boy in the young couple Cassie befriends, who gives up his girlfriend's (Bernadette) location, and then gives up Cassie's location to our baddies; or Wallen, who both can't decide whether he wants to let his daughter tell him what to do, or his new girlfriend, but even when he has a gun, it's his daughter Cassie who uses it to save them; or the brother (Jimmy Doom) in the brother-sister serial killer duo, who at first seems to be telling his sister, Hoveland, what to do, but really it's her that's pulling the strings; and then finally it's Cassie who saves her family. This isn't just some kind of Final Girl construct Wallen's leaning on, even though this film easily could've gone in that direction, the male characters are consistently weaker than their female counterparts. Even in the opening scene, where we see the young lady trying to escape the serial killers, I didn't think anything of it at the time, but it's the sister who catches her by shooting the victim first, so the brother can finish her off. The thing that keeps it from fully being a female empowerment movie is the same thing that keeps the thread of "some lives are worth more than others:" the fact that so many unfortunate girls are killed by these baddies.

Finally, while the other two Wallen films we've looked at on here took place in Michigan too, they could've taken place anywhere. This one, on the other hand, uses Michigan in a way that really works. I've only ever been to Michigan the one time I had to switch plans at the Detroit airport, which doesn't really count, so it's not like I'm intimately familiar with it, but there's enough ground laid by the story and scenery in this movie that I didn't need to be for it to work for me. We see so many films made in Michigan now, but so few of them use Michigan as part of the story, which to me feels like a wasted opportunity, especially with the state's tragedies and triumphs being so well documented. The abandoned buildings in Detroit that provide the playground for a trouble-making teen like Cassie, the remnants of a city that was once the engine that drove the nation; but at the same time, Cassie is the child of an upper class that also has remnants, and those remnants still exist in a way that the rest of the state, especially the rural areas, both respect and resent it. It's another area where this movie gives us a little more. This easily could've existed in a fictitious setting, and probably would've worked out fine; but by using Michigan this way, it becomes another character, one that plays an important role in how the film unfolds.

And with that, I'll wrap this up. If, looking at the cover, you're coming to this for another film about pretty young women getting killed in gruesome ways, you'll be disappointed; but if you're coming for a suspense thriller that gives you more than that in the story and performances, I think you'll be happy with this. As of right now it's available on Prime and Tubi, so I'd give it a shot on one of those.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10015244

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

An Hour to Kill (2018)

Our friend Joe Williamson gave me another screener for a Mel Novak film, and when I saw the trailer I was excited to check it out. This is the fourth screener we've received from him, and as I say, I always like being able to do these, so I was happy to get another opportunity. On IMDb, this has over 100 critic reviews, which seems crazy for a low-budget enterprise like this, but tells me more people than Joe were out there getting the word and screeners out to other reviewers. Man, I am in a massive ecosystem with this review game!

An Hour to Kill features a hitman (Aaron Guerrero) and his protege (Frankie Pozos), who have some time to kill before a job--the job is their boss, Mel Novak, wants Guerrero to kill Pozos, who has no idea. As they're killing time, Pozos tells stories, which become the horror anthology, starting with "Valkyrie's Bunker," which involves five girls going to get some pot on some farm near an old Nazi bunker; "Assacre," which has a dangerously hot chili pepper and some competitive eaters looking for revenge; and finally "Hog Hunters," which has a group of bowlers looking to have sex with some pigs who get more than they bargained for.

This felt like even more of the fun, 90s, low-budget horror I always loved than Tales of Frankenstein did. This is the kind of thing my buddies and I would have rented and worn out the tape watching and rewinding to rewatch the scenes we got the biggest kick out of. It had a bit of a Troma feel to it as well, and that's a kind of horror I've always enjoyed. The last one, "Hog Hunters," was a bit draggy before it got to the best parts, but I think that may have been due to the fact that footage from the first one, "Valkyrie's Bunker," was lost, so maybe they needed to make Hog Hunters longer to pad out the film. Padding is good when your delivering fragile products, but not when making movies. Regardless, that was a minor issue in an otherwise fun horror romp.

Joe has been doing a great job getting Mel Novak's tag count up. This is now three Novak films he's given us to screen, and when you combine that with two I've done on my own, Samurai Cop 2 and Nemesis 5, that's five Novak films in the year since I've returned from hiatus. That's actually the same number as Gary Daniels, and he's one behind other big names like Seagal, Adkins, and Rothrock, who all have 6--Dolph of course has the most with 9. This was a real fun turn for Novak here as a mob boss, and it seemed like he had fun with it, as small as it was. I'm not sure where we go next with Novak, but perhaps Joe will have another screener, and if so, that will mean another tag.

For me, my favorite story out of all of them was "Assacre"--though the point could be made that I would have preferred "Valkyrie's Bunker" more if all the footage was there, or "Hog Hunters" if it didn't have the padding, which is fair enough. "Assacre" was one of those Tromerific deals that, while I don't want to give away too much, had me both totally grossed out and in stitches. I guess "Hog Hunters" has a similar quality when it finally gets going, and "Assacre" had its slow moments too, but I think it paced out a bit better and had more fun to it overall, which made the payoff that much sweeter. I could see that as one of those classics from high school that my buddies and I would reminisce about today if we got together. Knowing us, we probably would have tried to show it in one of our classes under the pretext of a class project, and then pretended we didn't know how to use the VCR when the teacher was yelling for us to turn it off.

What was interesting about our two hitmen, was you had Guerrero as the guy with his shit together who doesn't want to kill Pozos but knows he has to do his job; while you had Pozos as this real obnoxious pain in the ass who had to play it in such a way that he was endearing enough that we wouldn't want him to get whacked. Like if Pozos plays it too obnoxious, we're looking to the hit as an applause scene; and if Guerrero plays his hitman as too much of a stone-cold killer, it makes no sense that this would be a struggle for him. For parts that were essentially bumpers around the anthology, for them to both play it so well, it enhanced the film in a way that those bumpers seldom do.

Finally, I saw a lot of comparisons to Pulp Fiction because we had two hitmen, which makes sense, but to some extent I think that's like saying any movie with a blindfold is trying for a 9 and 1/2 Weeks thing. The thing is, there were so many movies with hitmen in them that did try to bite on Pulp Fiction in the late 90s/early 2000s that a lot of us DTV fans still have PTSD from the 100-minute dialog fests where hitmen would have ironic conversations about such inane topics as cereal brands after committing a hit. It was insufferable. These characters had none of that, the writers weren't trying to remake their own foot massage or Royale with Cheese conversations; but I think Pulp Fiction was so influential for so many of us--including us who write the reviews--that we don't know how to talk about movies without using it as a pretext. It's a testament to how great that film was.

Since I'm no longer talking about the current film though, it's probably time to wrap this one up. This is a fun horror-comedy anthology that doesn't try to do too much beyond have a good time. It looks like you can find this on oldies.com, and possibly on Troma.com too. If you can track it down I say check it out. Thanks again to Joe for another screener. Can't wait to check out the next one from you!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4730224

Tales of Frankenstein (2018)

This is another screener submission from Joe Williamson, who got us Eternal Code and Abstruse. Unlike those, this one isn't a Harley Wallen project. It's also a horror film, which we haven't done a lot of on here lately. Finally, it's got Mel Novak, which is always a good thing. On the other hand, like Abstruse, it has a runtime closing in on 2 hrs. Uh-oh!

Tales of Frankenstein celebrates the bicentennial of the publication of Frankenstein (wow, 200 years since that came out already? Time flies!) with four short films that all present a new take on the Frankenstein theme. In the first, a relative of Dr. Frankenstein is trying to make his own Frankenstein bride, but when he brings her to life, will she have a surprise for him? The second involves a plague ravaging the village Dr. Frankenstein lives in, and after he dies, a neighbor wants to exhume his body to steal a ruby ring from his dead finger. Can't see anything bad happening there. The third is a pulp detective story with Mel Novak as a mad scientist who puts human brains in gorillas; and the last has a man related to Frankenstein who tries to revive his work in Transylvania.

The runtime gets it again. The thing is, if you lop off the last story you have 90 minutes but I don't know if that would have saved this, as each of the four all went a little longer than they needed to. For 25-minute affairs, they tended to waste a lot of the openings and spin their wheels a bit before getting to the meat of the story, so perhaps the better solution would have been to make them all shorter. 4 20-minute stories plus the bumpers and your hovering around 85-90 minutes. Now you're looking good, and from there the elements of this that I enjoyed, like how it brought me back to some of the low-budget horror my friends and I would rent from the video store in the early 2000s, can really shine through. That 90-minute rule might be the one that holds up the most in almost every situation, and this was no exception.

All four of these had the feeling of a one-off Tales from the Crypt episode, which was a great show and a lot of fun. The thing is though, for an anthology, they're all directed by the same person, Donald F. Glut, best known for his novelization of Empire Strikes Back. I think had they been done by different directors and submitted to an editor, that editor would have trimmed them all down; but because this was all Glut's writing and direction, he didn't see it that way. This is one similarity with the other two films Joe has submitted to us, as those two were directed and written by one person too. I used to be a big fan of that, especially considering how two of my favorite movies were made that way, Citizen Kane and Bad Taste, but I think I'm seeing more how giving a script to a director and letting the director and actors give it a once over can be important. When the writer is the director, they may be more protective or less likely to see how the dialog is going a bit too long, or how an opening scene isn't moving as it should. If I read a novel based on these four stories it would've felt well-paced, but in a movie those extra minutes can feel like an eternity.

This is our ninth Mel Novak film on the site. To give you an idea of where that puts him, he's passing Casper Van Dien's 8, and 9 also ties him with people like Kim Coates and Klaus Kinski. In this film he plays Dr. Mortality, the evil doctor who, in the name of Dr. Frankenstein, wants to put a human brain inside a gorilla's head. It has more of a pulpy feel to it, which I liked, but it didn't finish it off, if you know what I mean. I think I would have liked to have seen a better outcome for our gumshoe in the spirit of those old pulp novel/film noir stories. Anyway, Mel Novak doesn't look like he's slowing down at all, so expect to see him back here soon.

One thing this film reminded me about was the fact that horror tends to be one of the main bastions of the indie/low-budget film world. Unlike action, which requires a lot of money to blow things up, shoot people, and choreograph nice fight scenes, with horror it can be done for less, so the wealth of indie horror is much greater. As such, I think I've been doing that market a disservice by not covering it more. One of the films I did when I came back was Clownado, a Todd Sheets indie horror flick, and the people involved, including Sheets, were very appreciative of me giving it the spotlight, and as a result, their spreading the word about my review got it even more views, making it one of the most viewed posts I've made since I came back. It's like the Beatles said: "The love you take is equal to the love you make."

Finally, I wanted to wrap up with one of my favorite takes on the Frankenstein story. In the Highlander TV series, there was an episode where we learn that Lord Byron was an immortal, and in the early 19th century, he kills another immortal out on a lawn after hanging out with Mary Shelley. When he beheads the other immortal and the quickening happens, she watches it, the image of Lord Byron engulfed in electric bolts inspiring her to write Frankenstein. That's one area where this movie disappointed me: outside of the Novak story that had more of an old detective pulpy feel, the other three were pretty standard for what you'd expect out of a Frankenstein theme. What if someone had done something like what the Highlander writers did, maybe show where Shelley got her inspiration. Another different take on the story was Data's character on Star Trek: The Next Generation. There were more places this could have gone that it didn't, which I think was a missed opportunity.

With that, it's time to wrap this up. Once again, the 90-minute rule rears it's ugly head, and again it's undefeated. I think a half-hour shorter we would have had a fun collection of horror stories in the tradition of Tales from the Crypt. For me though, close to two hours is too long, and ultimately that hurts the film. Thanks again to Joe for another opportunity to look at a screener like this, I always enjoy the chance to do this!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7365740

Eternal Code (2019)

After I reviewed Nemesis V, which starred DTVC favorite Mel Novak, one of the producers of this film, Joe Williamson, came to me to see if I'd review it for the site, because it also has Novak. While the Mel Novak part was important, I think even bigger was getting the word out on another indie flick, so that was why I jumped at the chance. Let's see how it did.

Eternal Code is about a medical science company that develops the technology to download someone's mind into another person's body. It's the key to eternal life, the only catch is, someone has to die in order for it to work. For one member of the board, the sinister Richard Tyson in a great turn as a baddie, he thinks this isn't such a bad deal; for another member of the board, played by Erika Hoveland, she has some issues with a company playing God, and is letting her conscience get in the way. That's when Tyson ramps up the pressure by having her and her husband kidnapped so she'll change her vote. The fly in the ointment of his plan: her daughter escapes, and finds a homeless vet in the park she knows--who has a certain set of skills. Will those skills be enough to take down Tyson?

I'm of split mind on this, because there are two things at play here. First, I really like the overarching message: while we say all life is precious and sacred, some lives are more important than others in our society, and this concept of the rich living forever at the expense of the poor is the logical conclusion of our for-profit healthcare system. This is both a metaphor for our current system, and a commentary, and I really appreciated that. On the other hand, the whole kidnapping intrigue aspect felt like it spiraled out of control a bit at the end. People were being moved around like the MacGuffin in a Marx Bros. comedy. To me it betrayed the message, and bogged the film down, especially considering the film is 105 minutes long, already breaking the 88-minute rule. But I have to applaud the depth of the message and what this was trying to say. It's not easy to pull that off in a film that has limited resources like this one. I just wish they had leaned on that message more and less on the kidnapping parts.

Richard Tyson is a major standout in this as the baddie. I'm going to talk a bit more about that later, but he was bad from the first scene--they didn't even need to tell us he was a baddie, he just exuded it so much. To that end, I think that's another area where the kidnapping didn't need to be as drawn out, because we didn't need it as much to establish him as bad, he was already establishing himself in every scene. We last saw him here in the Seagal flick The Perfect Weapon, but that part wasn't as big as what he had here. He found a role he could sink his teeth into, and went for it, which is always great to see.

The director and writer of this is Harley Wallen, who also stars as one of the kidnappers. I was trying to figure out why I thought he looked familiar, and I saw that he had an uncredited part in Superman V Batman: Dawn of Justice, so that's probably it. According to IMDb he's got a fair amount of films that he's written and directed like this--including three others that were released in 2019 alone! Again, this one didn't fully work for me, but there were things in it that I really liked, so I'll be interested to check out the others to see how they are too. It looks like they're all on Prime, which helps.

There are a lot of messages in this about how we perceive money and power in our society, and while this has the standard "don't judge a book by its cover" with our hero, played by Damien Chinappi, as a homeless vet whom the daughter befriends after she and her friend make him food, and then when she needs to turn to him after her parents are kidnapped, it turns out he has the training to save the day. Beyond that basic message, this goes a step further, as his look is transformed when he's cleaned up and put in a suit. That transformation is as much a part of the message in this film as anything. We see Chinappi's character one way when he has one look, and then the exact same person is perceived differently when his look changes, again getting to this idea that some people are worth more than others in our society based on the rubrics we use to judge them. To that end you may even say that the movie's message is already a metaphor for the Iraq war vet, in the sense that the rich already sacrifice the lives of the poor so they can live longer when they send them to war.

*****SPOILER ALERT*******SPOILER ALERT********SPOILER ALERT***********
I want to discuss the ending here, so if you don't want to know it first, skip to the bottom. As I mentioned above, Richard Tyson was a great baddie, and what do we always want to see happen to a great baddie? That he gets his comeuppance. And in this one, while Hoveland escapes and the baddies seem to be defeated, Tyson is able to get what he wants before that: to have his mind transferred into the body of a healthier person. Perhaps this was setting up for a sequel, but even if it was, I needed some kind of a period in this film first, which involved Tyson not getting away with it. Yes, we know in real life the rich and powerful usually do get away with it, but that's why we come to movies, so we can see them not get away with it.
*****SPOILER ALERT*******SPOILER ALERT********SPOILER ALERT***********

We now return you to your regularly scheduled review, as it's time to wrap this one up. I think the best thing to do is read my review and, knowing my tastes from the other reviews of mine I read, determine if what I said worked and didn't work for me would make it a go for you. Right now you can stream it on Prime, and we know that's always a good way to catch it, as you're only investing time after you spent on the subscription. And thank you again to Joe Williamson for having me look at this! I'm realizing now I forgot to mention Mel Novak, but he's not in it that much, so that's okay.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8655738

Nemesis 5: The New Model (2017)

When you look at Albert Pyun's IMDb page, there is a lot of stuff in progress, but this was one that was already in the can and available on Prime and Tubi, so I wanted to make it happen, especially since I'd done the other four films in the series. On the other hand, Pyun didn't direct this, which had me wondering what I was in for. I guess the only way to find out is to dive in.

Nemesis 5 starts further in the future, where Alex Sinclair (still played by Sue Price) is training an orphan she came across after one of her missions. She trains this orphan, and when she grows up (the grown-up played by Schuylar Craig), sends her back in time to take down the Red Army and their campaign of misinformation before they can create the horrible future that everyone is living in. Along the way, she has to fight the Red Army's goons, looking to stop her at any price. Will she succeed?

This is definitely an interesting addition to the Nemesis story--and to some extent it feels like a place holder before Pyun really wanted to bring it all together by combing the Nemesis world with the Cyborg and Omega Doom worlds. That said, it's very low budget, and probably only for Nemesis completists--and from the IMDb user reviews, a lot of them weren't happy with it either. It wasn't as bad as those 1s and 2s would have you believe though, it had its bright moments, like the lead, Schuylar Craig. She's worked with the director, Dustin Ferguson before, but also fit really well into the kind of strong female lead Pyun likes to use. I also liked Mel Novak and Dawna Lee Heising, but they're only in it at the very end. And I think that's where the budget constraints really hurt us. It would've been cool to see the scene where Craig confronts Novak and Heising set in either a large boardroom, or a darkened underground layer--something with a lot of atmosphere that the previous entries gave us. And maybe that's the ultimate conclusion here, it's good, but it could have been better.

Albert Pyun didn't direct this, he was the executive producer, and Dustin Ferguson was the director. Don't get me wrong, I think Dustin Ferguson is very good, and good at what he does in the low-budget realm in particular, but you can see how in that scene I described above with Craig, Novak, and Heising, that he's not quite Pyun when it comes to Pyun's aesthetic. You can talk budget constraints to me all you want, but Pyun did Deceit over three nights for $25,000 using equipment that he already had to rent to do the Cyborg reshoots, and that movie had atmosphere for days. That older Noirish element that Pyun brought to the previous installments, plus the Russ Meyer 60s exploitation and 50s/60s low-budget sci-fi, all mixed with 80s cyberpunk in his own unique Pyun flair is a hard thing to pull off, even if he's approving everything that's happening. There was a part of me, as I watched this, that couldn't help but wonder what this film would have looked like if Albert made it himself twenty years ago. It definitely would have been a different movie.

That being said, when you look at Dustin Ferguson's previous work, it's pretty much all horror, so this is definitely a departure from that, and for someone who's just switching over to sci-fi, this is a challenging way to do it. Yes, we have to judge a movie solely on its merits, but I think for a first sci-fi effort, and working within the confines of a budget, he did well here considering. It'll be interesting to see if Pyun farms more of his projects out to other directors in the future, and which directors he chooses for that. Obviously I'd always prefer Pyun to direct, but for me, if the choice is the work gets farmed out or it never happens at all, I'll choose the former; and I also like the idea of giving it to someone like Ferguson so he can grow as a director and add something more to his toolkit, because that only makes his work better and gives us more enjoyment when we watch his films too.

As I mentioned above, this may have been a placeholder for things to come with Pyun, and you get that sense just by looking at his in-development credits on IMDb. One is Cyborg Nemesis: Dark Rift, which just sounds too amazing for words. We also have Cyborg: Rise of the Flesh Eaters, which Pyun is attached to, but could also be like Nemesis 5, a means to get us to that merging of the two stories. On top of that, Pyun has two Kickboxer sequels listed starring Sasha Mitchell. In looking into some of these, I realized that I missed out on some GoFundMe campaigns while I was on hiatus to back some of these projects, but hopefully, Albert's health allowing, we'll get to see some of these make it to us in some form.

Finally, it would be good here to discuss some of the stars of the film. It'll be interesting to see if Schuylar Craig reprises her role in future Nemesis films, or if she makes her way into more Pyun films, because I think she matches what he wants in that strong female lead. Mel Novak is someone who we've seen on the site a few times, and also has the distinction of being someone who has played the president in one of our movies. I'd say he may be the one people would recognize the most, with Dawna Lee Heising second, and they both share the screen a bunch at the end, but aren't in it much before that. And then Sue Price reprises her role from the original films, but isn't in this much beyond the beginning in her role as the one passing the torch on to Craig. She's done some other films with Ferguson after coming back to make this, so we may have to check those out as well.

And with that we wrap this up. Right now you can stream this for free on Tubi. I think that's a good way to do it, that way you can decide for yourself if you want to pay to get it on DVD. The hope is that, health and resources willing, this is the start of more to come from Pyun, and if that's the case, I can't wait to see what we get.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7008310

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

SWAT: Warhead One (2005)

Though this has an imdb date of 2005, the fact that it has almost the exact same cast as 2002's Power Elite means this was probably shot at the same time as that one. I know what you're thinking: "hey Matt, isn't it just as likely that both movies were shot in 2005, and it's Power Elite that was released three years before it was made, as opposed to SWAT: Warhead One being released 3 years after?" Excellent point. As with its companion film, I got a Dutch DVD rip of this one from a buddy because, like it's companion, it wasn't released here in the States. And like it's companion, I have a feeling this one wasn't released over here for a reason too...

SWAT: Warhead One is about a prototypical nuclear warhead that's stolen by the Russian mob, but because it's so unstable, no one on the black market wants to touch it. Olivier Gruner, who was on the Navy SEAL team that failed in protecting the warhead, gets a job with LA SWAT, and 8 years later, some shady happenings pop up that may or may not include said nuclear device. Turns out the Chinese mob is looking to scam the Russians by buying the warhead with counterfeit money. Now it's up to Gruner and Mel Novak as an intrepid reporter to crack this case and save the day.



Or something like that. The first fifteen minutes of the film are broken up with constant title screens, like we're watching a silent film, only it's not a silent film, it's a talkie, and people can talk and tell us the plot, they just don't. After the first 15 minutes though, we lose those titles, and without them, this thing is so all over the place that I'm not even sure the people writing it know who's who-- nor care. I'd be all right with that if something were happening, but until the last 30 minutes or so when we're treated to Die Hard in a hospital, we pretty much got nothing beyond the occasional silly passage of dialog, or random James Lew black and white fight scene. This is just bad, and it's no wonder Gruner looked like he was on the verge of tears in a few scenes.

Poor Gruner. I don't even know what's going on here, and I'm not so sure he does either. The worst thing you can do with a guy who doesn't speak English well is saddle him with bad dialog, and this is some of the worst. Then all of his fight scenes are butchered by bad slow-motion. The key to the fight scene is the slight of hand that comes with us thinking someone is getting hit when we know they aren't, and a big part of that is lost when we can see, frame-by-frame, the punch or kick missing a dude's face. I was thinking back on Gruner's filmography, and he started out with some really fantastic stuff: Angel Town, Savate, Automatic, Nemesis. Like someone like Gary Daniels, we can't blame him for some duds like this, it's just unfortunate that he's had a big string of them.



I want to get back to that dialog, because there were some hilarious moments, making me wonder if this was written by someone that's a native English speaker. First, at the very beginning of the film, Gruner preps his SEAL team about the warhead theft, and informs them that it has been "kidnapped". Nope, it hasn't, only people can be kidnapped. Inanimate objects are stolen. It's beside the point that the warhead hadn't actually been stolen yet when Gruner says this, that it was in the process of being stolen, and Gruner and his team get from NYC to the Bearing Strait in two hours, only to see it taken and a few helicopters explode, the main issue is the misunderstanding of what the word "kidnapped" means. The other one came later, when Gruner finds some evidence, and Novak tells him what he thinks it could mean. Gruner's response is "and why should I believe you?", as if Novak would be purposefully trying to deceive him. It would be like someone saying "the Chiefs haven't won a Super Bowl before, have they?", and someone else saying "oh yeah, they won Super Bowl IV", and then that person with the initial query, instead of saying "are you sure?" or "how do you know?", says "and why should I believe you?" Why would he lie about that Gruner?

Cine Excel mainstay Gerald Okamura plays the main villain in this, and, for my money, gets too little screen time. He's hilarious, the only one able to crack jokes and have them sound authentic, plus he had that sinister thing down to a T. This movie should have scrapped the whole investigation aspect, and gotten right to Okamura and co. taking the hospital hostage, and from there it should've just been Die Hard with Okamura lighting it up in the Hans Gruber role. Thirty more minutes of him, and this would've been a completely different review.



I'm kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel for a seventh paragraph here, so I thought I'd draw your attention to the Cine Excel website (actually "Ciné"), in particular this page of covers from their film library. We've done some of these, but not even close to half. There are some I definitely want to get my teeth into, some I'd afraid of, and some that look intriguing but I just know will bite me in the ass if I fall for their sweet covers. I guess what I'm saying is, this won't be the last time we see Cine Excel here at the DTVC.

And I can't believe I'm saying that after this Gruner double-feature painfest I just endured at their hands. Same as Power Elite, Dutch DVD, totally in English, anyone in Region 2 should be able to get their hands on it, or if you can play any region here in the States. I'm saying unequivocally though that this not only isn't worth the effort, but that you should expend that effort staying away.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340326/

Power Elite (2002)

I got hooked up with a Dutch DVD rip of both this and it's companion piece: SWAT: Warhead One. I was excited to get some more Olivier Gruner up, but not so excited to watch this, because I'd heard bad things and was a little leery. We have seen some great so-bad-it's-good efforts from Cine Excel before though, so there was a little hope.

Power Elite is not the great sociological work by C. Wright Mills, the eponymous term coined from which this film derives it's name (and a work and sociologist I was very familiar with in my undergrad days), but rather a cheap Cine Excel flick starring Olivier Gruner as... I don't know what, a Navy SEAL, an Air Force pilot, maybe a mix of both. Anyway, his old buddy, Cine Excel mainstay Mel Novak, becomes President, and is subsequently kidnapped by American separatists, and now it's up to Gruner to rescue him in time for him to sign an anti-chemical weapons treaty.



This is unabashedly bad, and while it makes for a fun bad movie, I wouldn't suggest tackling it alone. Lots of bad file footage, lots of bad CGIs, lots of flashback padding, all to stretch a wafer thin plot out as long as they could to make 42 minutes of movie 80 minutes. There are some nice spots where Gruner gets after it, but those are ruined by the constant slo-mo-- I'm assuming another ploy to stretch the movie out-- and often he does more take downs and holds than he does kicks and punches. This movie also does the classic two endings maneuver, where we think we're home and dry, but look at the meter and find out we're only 60 minutes in, and know that we still have some pain to endure. I don't even know if I'd say so-bad-it's-good here, more like if you have a TV show where you and some robot puppets make fun of movies, this might be worth a go.

This has to be a low point for Gruner, and I wonder if he had something to do with it not being released in America. If you look around the time period of this film all the way to the present, he has many more films that either weren't released in the US, or not released yet period. How did that happen? Is it that once Van Damme got into the DTV game, there was less need for the poor man's Van Damme? I don't know, it's not like Van Damme is pumping out tons of films. Just a string of bad luck then? Probably, but it's a pretty bad string. Hopefully his supporting part in the new Albert Pyun flick Tales of an Ancient Empire will raise his stock here in the States.



Mel Novak has a long, rich history in Cine Excel films. He's right up there with Gerald Okamura as far as that goes. Is casting him as the President a reward for all that loyalty? I don't know, he still has to be kidnapped, which can't be that fun. As far as Presidents we've seen go, poor Mel has some heavy duty competition. We're talking about guys like Roy Scheider, Rutger Hauer, Ronny Cox, and Jerry Springer.

One thing this movie didn't have was a lot of Power Elite. I won't get into C. Wright Mills and what his book was all about, in part because it'll probably bore you, and in part because it's been almost ten years since I was in undergrad, so I'm a little rusty on discussing that kind of thing anyway; but the basic idea is that you have some very powerful interests, major corporations and major military powers in particular, and they have the ability to manipulate the world to their benefit, with little regard to how that affects us little people. There were no people pulling the strings here, no intrigue, no behind the scenes decisions with grave implications. Why it was called Power Elite then is beyond me.



Finally, we have another McDonald's sighting in this file footage of an NYC protest that was padding out the film. I want to say it's Times Square, but I've never been there so I don't know for sure. I gotta say, it couldn't have come in a better movie, because I was scraping the barrel here for stuff to talk about. I'd like to tag all the movies that have McDonald's sightings in them, but the problem is I don't remember them all, so it would be hard to back track.

For my Region 2 readers, this is available, and the Dutch DVD rip is in English. I'm just not so sure you need to make the effort; and for my Region 1 readers, you definitely aren't missing anything. Some movies aren't released in the States for a reason, and it's probably better that I let them stay unreleased.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0329508/

Pocket Ninjas (1997)

I was completely shocked to find that this was available from Netflix. We're talking #9 on the imdb Bottom 100, and the film is still in print? On the one hand that sounds really cool, but on the other, I think of all the great Gary Daniels films that aren't in print or available on Netflix, and it irks me that this one is.

Pocket Ninjas has Gary Daniels as a sensei teaching his students how to be vigilante fighters in order to defeat the evil power of Cobra Khan, now embodied in a little kid named Cubby Khan, but originally embodied in DTVC favorite Robert Z'Dar, whose enormous face alone was bigger than that kid. Anyway, the kids go out and fight Cubby Khan's goons, then have some kind of showdown with virtual reality video games.



This lives up to it's Bottom 100 billing, but that's not exactly a good thing. First off, it's trying to be a parody of martial arts movies, but it's so not funny that it falls flat on its face. The number one rule to a good parody: be better than the material one is mocking, and Pocket Ninjas couldn't deliver on that. Second, it tortures us with these drawn out training sequences with the kid and the baddies that have no point other than hurting our sensibilities and hammering this repetitious synth music into our skulls. Third, we get a healthy dose of annoying kid actors, especially this one with a high pitched voice that was supposed to be our comedic lead, but just made me wish the girl in his group would kick him in the nuts-- over and over. Finally I don't know what was going on with Robert Z'Dar. They were going for some kind of Three Stooges thing, but I found myself with my mouth agape, totally stunned and baffled-- nonplussed, so to speak, not knowing how I was supposed to react. Had the people involved let off the schlock a little bit, and trimmed about five minutes off a lot of their scenes-- which is saying a lot for a film with a 76-minute running time-- this could've been a fun bad movie in MST3K terms. Instead, it was just 76 minutes of extreme tediousness annoying the hell out of me.

The opening credits tell us that this is a "special appearance" by Gary Daniels, but he's in it a fair amount, though some of those are clips from other movies, most prominent, Capital Punishment. He was trying his best here, so you gotta give him an A for effort, but this was a hardcore painfest. It's funny to watch, though, just to see Daniels giving it his best, not betraying the silly dialog, or the outfit, or the scene where he's covered in water (I guess sweating). In the review for Across the Line, we discussed Daniels's trend of doing smaller parts in films with bigger actors so he can rub shoulders with them. I wonder if this film is on his mind every time he takes one of these small roles. I wonder if, during the wrap party, he's deathly afraid someone will bring it up, maybe a practical joke where the scene of him covered in water is plastered across someone's 58" plasma.



Robert Z'Dar. Yep, showing us his comedic acting skills. Oh, I know, he's a comedic actor when he's playing it straight, what's it like when he's trying to evoke the Three Stooges? In a word, shocking. He's like the guy at the frat party who's like a friend of a friend, and gets really drunk and acts a fool, and you're there trying to not to make eye contact with him, for fear he'll bring his routine to you, and latch onto you, preventing you from making a connection with the girl you've struck up a conversation with. It was uncouth, and perhaps more frightening than any of the baddies he's ever played.

All of the scenes of Tadashi Yamashita are from Capital Punishment, and I guess for that reason he's uncredited. You also have a quick shot of Ian Jacklin-- the guy from Kickboxer 3-- probably also from another movie. How does one do that, make a 76-minute long movie, and use footage from another film? And then, half the scenes they did shoot originally went on too long. I mean, this entire thing is high school kids on YouTube quality, and I know if they had the rights to movies like Capital Punishment that they could splice in, they'd probably make a much better movie.



This was shot in 1994, but not released until 1997. With that in mind, I'm assuming the female lead, played by Sondi (just the one name, and just the one role according to imdb) is about my age, or maybe a year or two older. Her character, the way she looked, the way she dressed, the way she wore her hair, it reminded me of the girls I grew up with in middle school into high school. People my age probably remember what I'm talking about. Girls back then seldom wore skirts or dresses, usually dressed in slightly unflattering jeans and baggy shirts and sweaters with sneakers. It sounds like a Tom Boy, but these were feminine outfits, all these clothes came from the girls' of the department store section. There was something about those days when a girl that I was so used to wearing jeans and a sweater would come into to school with a skirt on, and though the girl in this movie never wore a skirt, there was something about her clothes that reminded me of those days, where a girl that I always thought was cute would be transformed into something more, just because, for whatever reason, today was a skirt day. It's so weird, because skirts are common on women today, and we really don't think anything of it, but back then, if a girl wore a skirt, it was a big deal.

Okay, so I'm way off track here reminiscing about the early 90s. Pocket Ninjas is enticing, believe me. imdb Bottom 100, Gary Daniels, Robert Z'Dar, and easily available on Netflix. Just be very careful, because you're entering into a 76-minute long painfest, something that will harm your sensibilities, and leave you for hours after with this atrocious, repetitive synth track buried deep in your dome.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107838/

Capital Punishment (1991)

I got this on accident, not that I wasn't going to review it eventually, I just wasn't expecting to have it as soon as I did. It was near the top of my Netflix queue, but not in first place, and the films above it weren't available like they were listed as being, and the next thing I knew I had an e-mail in my inbox telling me to expect Capital Punishment on Monday. Well, here it is.

Capital Punishment has DTVC Hall of Famer Gary Daniels as an underground kickboxer who draws the attention of the DEA when his old sensei starts dealing Kick, some Taiwanese designer drug that is very addictive, and causes birth defects. The DEA is being controlled by another HOFer, agent David Carradine, who is in cahoots with the sensei to distribute the drugs in the country. As things unravel, Daniels finds himself increasingly tangled in a web of intrigue and deceit. Can he roundhouse his way out of it?



I have a feeling I'm going to take a hit on this one, but I liked Capital Punishment. I don't know, it just had this surreal quality, like one of those dreams that seems real, until elements occur here or there that don't fit. The scenes were put together in this way that made them almost like non sequiturs. There were no bumpers, no transitions, things just seemed to happen. One moment Daniels is being interrogated, the next he's in a hallway fighting thugs, then he's shot with a tranquilizer dart, and wakes up in his bed. People use words like "immune" as verbs, middle-aged businessmen know martial arts, Daniels kills some people and leaves some alive with no rhyme or reason, and some of the stuntmen wear clothes or recite lines that make absolutely no sense whatsoever-- like this one dude in a bright purple polo and red pajama pants among a gang of thugs that are all wearing black. The best way to describe it is, if Andy Kaufman made a 1990s bad action film, this is what it would look like. And I don't know, I loved it. It was tons of fun. Maybe I'm just getting soft in my old age.

I don't know though, because if you go to my last however many Daniels posts, I haven't been too nice to them. At the very least here, they used him for his martial arts prowess, and didn't inundate us with bad dramatic sequences where Daniels' fighting was foregone for the sake of some misguided plot exposition. This was great because, even though the scenes seemed like maybe they didn't go together or came out of nowhere, he was getting into fights quite regularly, and his fights were tons of fun. In one he empties out a pay phone, puts the quarters in a sock, beats a dude with it, then spills the quarters out of the sock onto the dude, telling him "keep the change". Later, that guy comes back and throws some quarters at him, saying "I think you dropped these". Daniels thanks him by shoving a pool cue through his throat. This might not be Rage or Bloodmoon, but for my money it's pretty close, and for fans of old Daniels, you can't do much worse.



As for our other Hall of Famer in the film, David Carradine looks like he was in another movie, because he has two scenes with one of the other actors, Daniels' helper Linda Lightfoot, and the rest are of him by himself either on the phone, or behind the wheel of a truck. If you go back to the Martial Law II post, in the comments section Mr. Kenner from Movies in the Attic and I had a conversation about Billy Drago being grafted in like John Saxon in a bad Italian movie. I disagreed with him on that case, but in the case of Capital Punishment, I think we have a better example. If not for those two scenes with Linda Lightfoot, you'd say it was like Bela Lugosi in Plan Nine from Outer Space. I have to admit again, I actually liked that though. It just added to that fascinating surreal quality for me.

Daniels' sensei was played by Tadashi Yamashita. He's not quite the ninja star Sho Kosugi is, but he does all right. You may have remembered him as the Black Star Ninja in American Ninja. In Capital Punishment he was great. His scenes made almost no sense, not because his English was bad-- his English was the most coherent element!-- but because of what happened in them. He'd be in a business meeting with two prospective drug dealer/investors, and the thing would devolve into a fight with guys coming at him with martial arts moves, and him taking them down and breaking their necks. Part of me wonders what he thought of shooting on this movie. I mean, it must've helped that he didn't speak English that well, so as not to be too confused by what he was supposed to be doing.



I was trying to think of what to do for the seventh paragraph, and I decided on a second one devoted to Gary Daniels. This will be his 21st tag, which puts him in fourth all-time among actors, behind Dolph Lundgren, Lorenzo Lamas, and Michael Dudikoff. That number isn't as important as the number 50+ (okay, not really number, but you get the idea), because that's what Daniels could ultimately end up with when all is said and done. We like to call Dolph the Babe Ruth of DTV, well, that would make Daniels the Hank Aaron or Ken Griffey Jr. Right now he has six films in production, plus some others that will be out soon, like Tekken and Game of Death (which stars Wesley Snipes), so it's not like he's going to stop anytime soon either. The one argument one could make against him is that a lot of his tags come from really small roles, as opposed to Dolph, who is almost always the star of his films; but a tag is a tag, and Daniels is on pace to have the most.

I'm not sure if I can recommend this one. I loved it, yes, but in some sense it was from a weird fascination. I don't know, it felt like a Crispin Glover movie, the way things went together. But it was an action film, and a lot of fun. I guess you gotta ask yourself, what kind of action movie do I like? If you like them so bad they're good-- so weird they're fun-- this is your kind of movie.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101541/

Future War (1997)

My buddies and I first saw this classic on MST3K. Being a big Bernhardt fan from his work on the Mortal Kombat show and the Bloodsport movies, the film was particularly special. But it's also sufficiently ridiculous to make a solid MST3K episode.

Future War is about neither a war or the future. It's about these cyborgs that have enslaved the human race in the future, and Bernhardt plays one that's escaped. For some reason the cyborgs go back in time to take slaves. Also, there's a big ship that's in play. The cyborgs use dinosaurs as trackers when a slave escapes. Bernhardt, in escaping the dinosaurs, falls into the clutches of a drug user turned nun who tries to help him. He learns English quickly and recruits her and her teen gang to give their lives to save his from the dinosaurs. In the end Bernhardt heroically saves the day.



This film is a work of beauty. I'm still not exactly sure what the film makers were going for, and I think that makes it all the more endearing. The dinosaurs are extremely hilarious. I don't know why they're there, what they're doing, or how they kill people. Also, when they die, they explode into a cloud of dust. I'm surprised the Christian Right doesn't use this film to refute the dinosaur's existence. If they all explode into clouds of dust when they die, then how do paleontologists find their bones?

The cyborg chasing Bernhardt is sweet too. He's got this big, doughy face, and looks more silly than imposing. His two main modes of attack on Bernhardt are his arm, which shoots a collar that attaches itself to Bernhardt's neck and restricts his movement; and his superhuman strength, which he uses to throw Bernhardt through stacks of empty boxes. He also indiscriminately kills other people, which gives the movie a slasher film element.

This may be Bernhardt's best role. He's extremely believable as the human slave who becomes fluent in English in a day or two, and can out fight large, plastic dinosaurs. When some investigators cut out this large tracking device from the back of his neck, you can really see in his face just how absurd it is. He can also stab dinosaurs with a knife, leave the knife in it, then have it magically reappear in his hand.



This film has a tribute to the Bunuel classic Viridiana. It has the soon-to-be nun who takes in a bunch of riff-raff that no one else believes in, and gives them a chance at a better life. I'm wondering if the film makers had trouble reconciling Bunuel's ending, where the riff-raff take advantage of the woman's largess by destroying her late aunt's nice house, and two of them almost rape her; because here the riff-raff performs admirably as they give their lives to the dinosaurs and cyborgs so Bernhardt can save the day. On the other hand, they may be making the statement that that's all the poor are good for. Maybe I'm just reading too much into this by finding a connection between this and the greatest Spanish director of all time, and really the film makers just thought the idea of a nun with a sordid past was hot.

You could probably buy this for like $5 on DVD. Do it. You won't be disappointed. Whether you're a novice or a pro at mocking films, this is a must have. If you can get the MST3K version of it, do that too. They did a great job, as they always do, in making a silly film even better. You just can't go wrong here.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113135/