Intent to Kill (1992)

For this month's PM flick, I thought I'd do the last of the three early 90s PM flicks Traci Lords did that I needed to review. In addition to us, this is a Superfecta movie, because Christ the Brain at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, and Mitch at the Video Vacuum have all covered this; plus Jon Cross at the PM podcast did an episode on this as well.

Intent to Kill has Traci Lords as a cop on the edge. Her chief and mentor (Yaphet Kotto) wants her to be safe, so he takes her off the assignment she had to take down a Colombian drug cartel member (Angelo Tiffe), only to have her find more trouble elsewhere. Her live-in boyfriend (Scott Patterson) is a deez, dem, and doze Italian American from North Jersey who does his hair and slaps on cologne to get the paper so he can flirt with the neighbor who likes to ride her bike in her dental floss bikini. As you can imagine, she catches her beau in their waterbed with a lady he met at the bar, then proceeds to go Mitchell on his antique car he loves so much. Now it's on her to stop this Colombian and his cronies, only she not only has to deal with them, but her jealous ex that's trying to sabotage her career.

This one is a lot of fun. It's everything you want in a PM flick: a strong lead, great car flips and stunts, fun supporting stars, and this crazy PM world where danger is everywhere and our hero needs to shoot her way out of it at a moment's notice. At the same time, there's a lot you wouldn't expect about Lords's character being a woman in a man's world, and how even the people that want to help her succeed, like Yaphet Kotto's character, still impede her progress. The end was a little bit off for me, because Lords's character gets herself in a bad situation that wasn't consistent with how she was in the rest of the film, but I also understood it was their way of getting rid of Scott Patterson's character, and considering how he was, in PM world he had to go--hey hey, ho ho, Scott Patterson's got to go! You either like PM flicks or you don't, and if you do, this is right up your alley.

These three Traci Lords early 90s PM flicks all feature great performances by her, which is kind of crazy when you consider how young she was acting opposite all of these older guys. It's not just that she holds her own, it's believable that she would be the best and most capable among the older male characters she's acting opposite of. Looking at her career, in '95 she was starting to get parts on network TV shows like Melrose Place and Roseanne, and I think there was a sense that a bigger breakout was coming, but it never quite came, and she ended up coming back to PM to close out the decade with two more films. This is now her sixth film on the site, which doesn't sound like a lot, but there's a five-way tie for sixth most all-time among women on the site at seven movies, so she's one away from that, and we have another film coming this month with her in it, so she'll be hitting that in a couple weeks. The question from there is, is the Hall of Fame in sight? Everyone in the top five all-time for women on the site are in, and the bottom of that list is nine films, so I'd say it's in sight.

We're now at 56 PM films at the DTVC, which sounds like a lot, but we have another 50 or so to go to have them all, and if we're doing one a month, we won't get there until 2030, so we still have some work to do. This has a lot of what you want in a PM flick. For example, when Lords catches Patterson in bed with another woman, the bed is a waterbed. Like when Patterson runs after Lords, the woman he's sleeping with is bobbing up in down due to the waterbed waves. That alone is amazing, but then he chases Lords out to his car, where she proceeds to do a Mitchell with the woman's panties and the gas tank of his car, lighting the panties and blowing up the back of the car. How amazing is that? Only PM would think to do the waterbed/Mitchell combo like that, because they're probably the only ones who could pull it off. I also mentioned above the DP duo of Blakey and Pepin. We get these beautiful shots of the LA streets at night from Blakey, and then Pepin gives us these fantastic, clean looks of the action moments. Finally, we have the stunt team of Red Horton and "Broadway" Joe Murphy working on this one, combined with Scott McAboy as second unit director. It gives you that quality of PM you want when you fire one of these up and want to escape for 90 minutes.

What do you do with Yaphet Kotto in this? He's the police chief, he sits in his office and tells Lords she's causing so much trouble it's driving him to drink bourbon in the afternoon, yet when he sees her at the bar after she catches Patterson in bed with another woman, he proceeds to drink from her Bud Dry sitting in front of her, so maybe his character has more of a drinking problem beyond Lords's antics. He never leaves the station except for that visit to the bar, the rest of the time he's either in his office or out among the desks that the rest of the detectives are sitting at. We have seen Kotto before, in the Busey film Eye of the Tiger, and it's weird seeing him in stuff like this, but in looking at his IMDb bio, it's closer to 50-50 on the low-budget DTV stuff than you'd expect from someone who had the career he had. That then begs the question, is the Hall of Fame a possibility for Kotto? It looks like it's more in play than I expected.

Finally, going back to the cinematography, and just looking at PM films overall, they did more than just set their films in LA and shoot in LA, they made LA a character in their films the way we think of New York City as a character in movies. And I'm not talking about LA as a novelty location like in Beverly Hills Cop, or suburban LA like in License to Drive, but like really making the city of LA a character, using more local locations, and not being afraid to be specific. Like when Lords is following a lady of the night who was connected with one of the Colombians, we saw places like Frederick's of Hollywood, but in the context of a gritty Hollywood in the middle of the night. I think a lot of filmmakers and studios were afraid to give people that LA, thinking the audience wouldn't get it, but it feels like the PM folks didn't care, which I think is great. And now 30 years later it's a time capsule that we can go back and watch.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Fawesome, or there's a decent copy on YouTube too, which I added to my PM playlist on my YouTube channel. This is another good one from PM and Traci Lords, worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107222/

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

Eye of the Tiger (1986)

I saw this film at my local video store and rented it with a couple others on some kind of rent two get one free night. With Busey's face on the cover, I figured I couldn't go wrong, especially if I was only paying two-thirds the price... is that right? Buy two... yeah, that works out.

Eye of the Tiger stars Gary a Busey as a man getting out of prison, we find out after being framed by the bad sheriff of the town he lives in. While he'd been in prison, a bad gang of murderous coke running dirt bike riders has been terrorizing the town. One night, keeping watch over a construction site, Busey sees the gang trying to rape a soap opera actress. He saves her, much to the chagrin of the bikers. In an act of revenge, they trash his home and kill his wife while his daughter watches. Busey wants revenge of his own now, but the bad sheriff is a pain in the ass. Yaphet Koto is the sheriff's deputy, and Busey's friend, and at first he wants him to just leave well enough alone. He has a change of heart, though, and with Busey, they go after the bikers: Busey with a battle-grade Dodge Ram and Yaphet Koto with a biplane. It was hot. Also, the head bad biker was played by classic character actor William Smith. You may know him from every 70s and 80s detective show.

This was an interesting film. As far as Abusiveness went, it was very Abusive. That raises an important question: just how much Abusiveness is too much? I think the standard for the perfect level of Abusiveness is Point Break. Call that point zero, or maybe at an even balance. This film was like a plus 4, which isn't bad, but a little more Abusiveness than you'd want. He does make for a cool lead good guy, though. Very down-to-Earth, you know?



This film plays for some like a re-tread of the Joe Don Baker film Walking Tall. I disagree. I feel this was actually how Walking Tall should have been made, i.e. sans Joe Don Baker and/or the Rock. I'm always saying on the DTVC how film makers should remake bad films with this or that in them to make them better, and I think this one did that. Okay, probably not; I mean I don't see the people who made this saying "why don't we remake Walking Tall with Gary Busey because Joe Don Baker sucks", but it's what I would've done, and it's cool that it happened.

Yaphet Koto is in this. It's weird, because he brings a touch of class to the film that doesn't really belong there. It's like the Seinfeld where everyone was eating Snickers bars with a fork and knife. I can't imagine this was a real resume booster for him either. He should be doing Othello or Homicide: Life on the Streets. I can't imagine what it was like for him on set having to shoot these bad action movie scenes. It must've eaten away at his soul.



The head baddie was William Smith. He's listed on imdb as being like 73 years old. I can't believe it. Growing up he was in every TV detective show I used to watch. He almost always played the bad guy. I'd imagine men like Martin Kove and Brian Thompson owe him a huge debt of gratitude, because they wouldn't be anywhere today if it wasn't for William Smith. This PBR's for you, my man. You're one of the good ones.

I'm not sure why his wife was killed off. I guess to give us the sense that he had nothing left to lose, which wasn't exactly true, because he had the traumatized daughter. I have to assume the original idea was to off the wife, and then let Busey hook up with the soap star. I guess that was cut from the final version. It seemed like they might go for it, when Busey gave her a ride home and they had some beers, but it ended there.

There was another scene where I had the sense that they were looking to add another thread to the plot that was eventually cut from the final product. Busey gives a speech to his fellow townsfolk while they're playing bingo, imploring them to take a stand against the bad sheriff. As he does it, this man in a cowboy hat keeps looking like he wants to stand up and join Busey. They keep showing him and his emotionally torn face. We get the sense that he may show up later and do something, but he never does, so the focus on him just looks really weird.



Before I wrap up, I gotta mention this two sweet way Busey offs one of the bikers. The Biker's in the hospital, and Busey needs to know where the rest of them hang out because they've kidnapped his daughter. So he goes into the guy's hospital room, and lubes up a stick of dynamite, and sticks it in the dude's butt. He lights the fuse, and the guy freaks and tells him where his friends' hide-out is. Then Busey leaves, and the guy dies of a heart attack from fear of his ass exploding, just as the wick smolders out: it was a dud. That may have been one of the best uses of irony in a film ever.

I feel like you've really got to be a Busey guy to dig this film. I kinda am, so I did, but if you don't, you won't. That's really my big caution to you. In my mind, this was a tad too Abusive for me; like if you used an Asian food star system to determine the spiciness, this was about a three or four star movie. Many people like their Abusiveness at a lower level, and I can't blame them for that.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091027/