The Deadliest Prey (2013)

 

Tagline:

In Vietnam he was the best… now he has to prove it again! 

Movie Review:

Well it definitely has been a long time between drinks on this blog! My new four month old son certainly takes up a lot of my reviewing energy, that's for sure! But if any film could get me back in the mood for a review, it would certainly be Deadliest Prey. It will come as no surprise to my readers that Deadly Prey is one of my favourite action films. A perfect example on filming with non-actors on zero budget, done right. With it's over-the-top acting, brilliant synth rock score and Ted Prior's mullet, the film delivers on so many promises. So how does the sequel fair?

After serving 27 years in prison, presumably for the events of the first film, Col. Hogan (David Campbell) is released with only one thing on his mind - revenge. During his incarceration he had given orders for a new training camp to be established, this time with the addition of video cameras in the forest to broadcast the game over the Internet; this time he wants the whole world to see who really is the best. Mike Danton (Ted Prior) wakes one morning being asked of his wife to take the trash out (sound familiar?). When he makes it to his front gate, Danton is asked for directions by a passer-by in a van (cameo by Director David. A Prior himself). What happens next should be obvious to fans of the first film!

With his new army of soldiers by his side, Col. Hogan shows himself to the captured Danton who can barely believe that this is all about to happen again. Danton runs into the forest and proceeds to kill off the soldiers one by one, just as he did before, with whatever weapons he can lay his hands on. This time, however, Col. Hogan is expecting this and plans accordingly. Fritz Matthews returns as Thornton, however as he was killed in the first end - famously having his arm chopped off and then being beaten to death with it - this time Thornton is actually his twin brother out for his own revenge!

I had a blast watching this. An absolute blast. I was pretty apprehensive as to how this would shape up, as I'm sure many fans of the first film were. Sequels with such a gap between them rarely work (Predators, anyone?). Earlier this year I was excited to watch David's then-latest film, Night Claws, a film that reunited Ted Prior with David Campbell, and the addition of Reb Brown in a film about killer Bigfoot. Unfortunately for me, the all-star cast and premise didn't quite work out and I found myself getting bored during the second act. With that in mind, I had wondered if the gang could make a sequel to Deadly Prey work at all.

Thankfully my fears were unfounded. This is how you make a sequel to a cult classic - do the same thing again, with an additional revenge angle. That's all you need and that's what we received. Does it reach the highs of the first film? Not quite, but it gets damned close. After all, Deadly Prey has the 80's on its side - it is hard to compete with that!

From the opening scene that repeats the famous silhouette, to Danton taking out the bins (thankfully this time not in cut-off denim jeans!), to the chase through the jungle that sees most of the cast killed off by Danton's hunting knife, machine gun and Rambo-style traps.. I was hooked. The action barely holds up and Danton just keeps piling those bodies higher and higher. There are plenty of love-letters to the original film that I enjoyed as well. For example, in the first film, after what seems like only a day, Mike Danton is reduced to catching and cooking a rat for dinner. This time he is lucky to find a tin of dog food! It was also great to see practical effects shots, with all the explosions (except, I'm sure, the exploding helicopter!) being real pyrotechnics and lot's of fun knife-to-the-head gags.

If I had to pick a fault with the film it would be the addition of the computer hackers. The introduction of the Internet angle makes sense, but the three computer hacker characters, who stumble across the live feed of the action, made the film go from timeless muscle-bound action to 1995-era computer culture, and not very seamlessly. The hacker girl, Candy, with hot-blue coloured stripes in her hair and continual replying to every sentence with "true dat" started to get old very quickly. The characters do serve their purpose, however, and by using their skills to locate Danton and provide help add an extra dimension to the story.

I read an interview with Ted before seeing the film that talked about how he and David wanted to approach the sequel - should it be a parody of the first film, or should it be played straight? The most important part of The Deadliest Prey is that it is played entirely straight. Yes, many lines are tongue in cheek, but this is by no means a joke film. Ted, David, Fritz et al. give their best performance and it shows in the final movie. Col. Hogan is far more unhinged than before, consumed by 27 years of planning his revenge. Mike Danton has moved on with a new family but still has flashbacks to the first time he was hunted. And Thornton.. well, he's the same old Thornton (except that he's really his brother).

Coming out soon from David A. Prior's new production house Night Claws Productions is "Relentless Justice", starring Eric Roberts, Vernon Wells (Bennett in "Commando"), Mark Rolston (Drake in "Aliens") and of course, Ted Prior. I hope that it delivers as much as The Deadliest Prey did for me. Watch this alone or watch it with friends, you are guaranteed to have a good time.

Highlight:

The fact that this film was made at all is the highlight, but I'm definitely (and this is a huge spoiler) going for the scene that has Col. Hogan accidentally chop Thornton's arm off - just like the first film - and have Danton beat him around the head with the wet end. I think I cried at the awesomeness of this scene.

Sourced From:

The film can be purchased directly from David A. Prior's website, www.deadliestprey.com (screenshots in this review taken from the site's photo gallery).

Trailer:

Airboss (1997)

 

Tagline:

When Terrorism Threatens America, They Threaten Back.

Movie Review:

In the former Soviet Republic, the military are working on a new fighter, the MIG 35 "Firebomb". Unfortunately some ex-Spetsnaz soldiers, led by Bone Conn (Kayle Watson, an actual Navy SEAL), go ahead and steal the thing in order to dominate the world's oil supplies (somehow). The Pentagon gets involved and send in special forces to take it back, aided by top gun Frank White (Frank Zagarino), a jet pilot who can't forgive himself for the death of his student during flight training. Frank has to overcome his fears, defeat the bad guys and get the MIG back.

Oh sweet jesus, this was just appalling. Easily the worst Zags film I have seen so far, by a long shot. The only redeemable feature of the film was the Zags himself; other than him, this film featured the worst acting I have ever seen in anything made available for sale to the public. This truly is student film quality. The camera is the shakiest I have ever seen (I had to close my eyes a few times to give them a rest), not even able to focus on a television screen without wobbling all over the place. Hell it can't even stay in focus a lot of the time, and horrible effects are employed to simulate motion such as spinning the camera in a circle like a bad transition.

Most of the film nothing actually really happens. Frank flies stock footage jet, crashes stock footage jet, walks through desert, gets captured, escapes, comes back to get MIG and bad guys. All the while the most obnoxious Casio keyboard soundtrack plays underneath. The action, when it happens, is atrocious. I roughly estimate that half of this film is stock footage of jet fighters flying in circles, military helicopters zipping about, and soldiers running on sand. You can tell when it's stock footage, too, because the camera stops fucking shaking. When it actually is Zags or somebody else shooting, the muzzle of the gun is mostly just out of shot so that no effects have to be used. In a battle scene in the final third - the only vaguely passable part of the film - we do see some actual guns being fired by the stars of the movie. Woop-de-fucking-do.

And the dialogue. Oh, the dialogue. Some choice lines include "I'll have all your asses like white on rice", and "That major night time drop that became a goat fuck." Excuse me? Became a what? If it wan't for that one line, this film could have passed for family time viewing. Not that you would want to subject your family to this, but that's beside the point. And I can't forget the brilliant line Zags spouts during the final dogfight with Conn: "Oh you know America, the country that paralysed your nation? Forced your people to sell trinkets by the road side? Hahaha." What in the actual fuck.

Director J. Christian Ingvordsen has made a living out of direct to video action - which should be applauded in my books - but this is the first film of his I have seen, and it's not good. Can you believe there are four of these Airboss movies? FOUR. According to his IMDB bio, "The AIRBOSS films feature state of the art digital and miniature effects as well as unprecedented access to United States military hardware." What film was this guy watching? It certainly wasn't the first Airboss film, that's for damn sure.

No. Just no. But I won't write off Ingvordsen from seeing the one film. Our friends at Comeuppance Reviews enjoyed his film Comrades in Arms, so I'll check that out at some point. I have to see the Airboss sequels: Airboss II: Preemptive Strike, Airboss III: The Payback and Airboss IV: The X Factor. I really, really do.

Highlight:

Frank had BAD DOG written on the front of his helmet. That's it.

Sourced From:

An ex-rental VHS from around the time the film first came out.

Trailer:

There's a video on YouTube that claims to be for Airboss, but none of the footage in that trailer was in the movie. Who knows, maybe it's really and just another feather in the cap for this shit-storm of a movie, but as it doesn't represent Airboss at all, I decided not to include it.

Death Race 3: Inferno (2012)

Tagline:

The rules are simple: Drive or Die. 

Movie Review:

After successfully winning four races during and after the course of Death Race 2, Carl Lucas aka Frankenstein (Luke Goss) only has one more race to win and will gain - along with the rest of his crew - a full pardon from Terminal Island Penetentiary. Unfortunately for Lucas, the Death Race franchise has been bought out from under Weyland's (Ving Rhames) watch by new owner Niles York (Dougray Scott), who does not intend to honour the previous bargain. Instead, the racers are shipped off to a new desert race track in South Africa. Will Lucas live long enough to gain his freedom from the new tyrannic race-master?

I was a big fan of the first film with Jason Statham and very much enjoyed the direct-to-video prequel from 2010. I stated back then that while the script had some niggling continuity errors, the CAR-nage more than made up for it. Death Race 3: Inferno ramps up the CAR-nage (okay, okay…) with even bigger explosions and crashes than it's predecessor, and much more interesting and varied scenery. Setting the race in South African sand dunes and slum towns was a good idea, I thought, and sees the racers combat in far more unpredictable terrain than a track in a prison complex. Indeed some of the shots of the dunes, valleys and towns are quite attractive (There's certainly a lot of red sand around that place).

Where the film falls down is the characterisation - or complete lack of it. There is no growth of any of the (returning) characters: Danny Trejo's Goldberg, Fred Koehler's Lists, Taint Phoenix's Katrina and Carl "Luke" Lucas plod their way through the film not really bringing anything new or interesting to the table, outside a very small handful of light-hearted additions. Goldberg for instance has a very small fling with a nurse after being injured in the race. An attempt is made to introduce jealousy to the Katrina character but you really just don't care that much. We meet a handful of new characters, principally the new drivers (with names like Razor, Nero, Olga, Fury, etc), but none are that interesting - in fact the one called Psycho was really getting on my nerves by the end of it with his bad lines. Some of the more interesting exchanges involve the uncredited African locals, who get in on the race as well bringing their own cars and machine guns in to the mix, and there's even some minor humour when the race intrudes into the peoplehomes (literally).

Ving Rhames literally phones in his performance as Weyland (half of his scenes are on a car phone). He is really only here to hand over the reigns to new boss York, which is a shame. York himself is the guy you love to hate; the only one in the film you could have any emotional connection with, albeit a negative one. He double-crosses, violently outbursts at his staff - poor secretary Prudence (Roxane Hayward) cops the brunt of it - and holds a massive grudge again Lucas that will see him try to sabotage his own Death Race. Another returning character is competing driver 14K (Robin Shou) who literally spends his whole time yelling in a Chinese dialect to his co-driver and not much else (that lack of character development problem again).

There also seems to be far more shaky-cam in this one and far, FAR too much ultra-zoomed-in shots. When the cars are flying over sand dunes or crashing through shanty towns, the picture is great. When the camera focuses on the drivers we can see up their nose. And in the fight sequences we see a lot of elbows and feet as the camera jerks around. It's not the worst example of MTV-style film making I've seen (see the early/mid-2000's Seagal flicks for that) but it was off-putting.

So the race mayhem itself is still as good as ever, and the scenery is far more interesting than before, but the lack of empathy or even interest I had for the characters really brought this one down. There's no chatter between the drivers and co-drivers of any real purpose, and between matches in the pit nothing much goes on. I will say that the final third does bring some "Aaaaaaah!" moments that rectify this to a fairly substantial degree, but the writers and director could have spiced up the dialogue for the rest of the film. Recommended of course for the action, but I think I will find myself re-watching part two more than part three.

Highlight:

The vehicular mayhem is pretty epic, but the sixteen year old boy inside me couldn't get past the glorious opening girl-fight sequence. To pick the ten winning co-pilots, all the girls are thrown into a ring to fight to the death. Similar to the sequence in the previous Death Race prequel, the contestants in skimpy outfits that promote breast size unlock weapons and kill each other in over-the-top fashion until only ten combatants remain. I very much enjoyed the flame thrower. I also quite appreciated the brief, slow-mo shower sequence with Katrina, baring all her assets. Ahem. 

Sourced From:

The Australian blu-ray, presented in excellent quality 1.78:1 widescreen with a thundering DTS soundtrack.

Trailer:

Hunt to Kill (2010)

Tagline:

Survival of the Baddest.

Movie Review:

Steven Austin is Jim Rhodes, a U.S. Border Patrol agent, is out camping and hunting with his unwilling teenage daughter Kim (Marie Avgeropoulos). She gets bored and drives to town and gets busted by the sherif for shoplifting. Her unimpressed father comes to bail her out, but at the same time a gang of bank robbers are holding up the sherif station. Killing the sherif for being uncooperative, the family Rhodes are forced to help the bank robbers track their way through the forest to find their bounty, which was stolen by a double-crossing associate.

That's the plot in a nutshell, very simple and straight-forward. The film runs for 90 minutes and generally moves at a fair clip even though most of it is slowly walking through a forest. There are enough detours, deviations and chances for Gil Bellow's trigger-happy Banks to take out those that get in his way to spice things up. It seems a bit odd that these people - who can rob a bank with the aid of non-existent voice synthesising technology to divert an incoming police pursuit - need the help of a ranger so badly, but that's just one of those "Well I guess they needed to make a plot out of something" details that I can (generally) forgive. Along the way, both Rhodes attempt to escape a couple of times, and in the third act we presume that Jim is killed. That's when he comes back Rambo-style, armed with a convenient crossbow!

Gil Bellows (True Justice and a bunch of other TV) was good, albeit predictable, as the main bad guy Banks. He's everything you love to hate in a bad guy boss; he holds a serious grudge that forms the focus of the film, he does not accept incompetence among his own team, and he never stops grinning evilly. Banks was a seriously dislikable character, which means Bellows succeeded in crafting a good baddy. Good enough for 90 minutes of direct-to-video action, anyway. I did give a little cheer when he got his comeuppance.

Gary Daniels plays Jensen, Banks' second-in-command and the most well-balanced and loyal of the team to Banks. Daniels' thick British accent (thicker than usual, it seems) really stands out like a sore thumb. I was disappointed in the lack of action that Daniels' had on screen, actually. Mostly it's just bickering between the rest of the gang, a couple of shots fired and then the final fight with Austin - which at least was worth the price of entry as he gets a few decent roundhouse kicks in to Austin's face. The other gang members (Michael Eklund's "Geary" the techie one, Adrian Holmes' "Crab" the incompetent one, Emiliie Ullerup's "Dominika" the pretty one) are all pretty bland and not really worth discussing. They simply serve as cannon fodder for both Rhodes and a pissed-off Banks.

Director Keoni Waxman is quite prolific among the DTV-action world, particularly with Austin and our favourite Steven Seagal. He directed both of them together in Maximum Conviction, a film I enjoyed more than the rest of the world (it seems), and is helming the upcoming Seagal/Danny Trejo/Ving Rhames vehicle, Force of Execution. On paper that one sounds a blast. Waxman's also, in retrospect, put many cast members from this and his Seagal films into Seagal's television serial True Justice.

You may have noticed that I tagged Eric Roberts but so far have not mentioned him. That's because the son-of-a-bitch is dead before the opening credits roll! In a scene that is only there to show Austin receiving a watch that will come in handy later, he and Roberts take down a meth lab in the middle of nowhere, Texas, and Roberts faces the mean end of a drug dealer's shotgun. That's it. Although he's not on the cover of the DVD or any of the photos on the back, he is listed as #1 on IMDB in the credits list - so I'm calling this a bait-and-switch on technicality.

Overall I thought this was decent enough, if you can ignore the obvious plot faults of a crew of technologically-benefited bank robbers not being able to determine where North is without a 17 year old girl to help them. And if you don't expect to see Eric Roberts for more than a millisecond. Seriously he must have just been driving by the set when Waxman shouted out "Hey Roberts! Want to make fifty bucks?" Check out what our buddy at the DTVC thought of the film as well. I commented on his review two-and-a-half years ago but I'm only just getting to mine now!

Highlight:

Serious spoiler alert! There are two main highlights for me; the eventual one-on-one fight of Austin and Daniels, and the final (drawn out) death-throws of Gil Bellows' Banks character who "dies" not once, not twice, but three times. Eventually after hobbling away from the first two failed attempts at being dispatched by Rhodes, Banks pushes for a third attempt by quipping at Rhodes "Is that all you got, mountain man?! You can't kill me!". To which Rhodes invokes the films title: "When I hunt.. I HUNT TO KILL!" (given in away in the trailer) and ploughs Banks down with a quad bike in a hilarious fashion, before blowing him and the quad up with a flare gun. Champagne stuff and worth seeing the film to the end for.

Sourced From:

Region 2 DVD from Anchor Bay. Sharp 16:9 print as you would expect.

Trailer:

Silencers (1996)

 

Tagline:

The government denied they exist. But the Men in Black are here... 

Movie Review:

Jack Scalia plays Agent Rafferty, a Secret Service agent tasked with protecting a Senator. He fails in this task when a group of strange Men In Black terrorists manage to eliminate their target, however, all is not normal with these terrorists. Meanwhile a group of scientists at the Phoenix corporation are working on creating a dimensional portal between our world and an alien world, overseen by the same Men in Black that killed the senator - the leader being an alien called Lekin (Carlos Lauchu, Anubis in the Stargate film) who looks a lot like Skrillex with those black-rimmed glasses. Coming unexpected through the activated portal is another alien, Comdor (Dennis Christopher, Fade to Black, Circuitry Man II, Alien Predator) who is here to close the portal and rid Earth of the silently-colonising Men in Black race (called the Marcabians) but unfortunately is knocked out cold and captured. Agent Rafferty is tasked with transporting a payload (that he does not know is a restrained Comdor) to a research facility, but the Men in Black have other plans.

Wow! I didn't think PM Entertainment would be capable of science fiction this good, but I have been (happily) proven wrong. This is actually very good stuff. The action quotient is very, very high and the science fiction elements work well. This is the kind of thing that the SyFy channel should be spending their money on - less CG creature-features and more Men in Black with exploding cars!

Jack Scalia is believable as a Secret Service agent. He plays the role cool and professionally, and after being smacked in the face with the proof aliens exist just gets on with his job - to protect the payload - however, Dennis Christopher is very good as Comdor, and has the required "what is this human emotion you call love?" quirks down pat (though in this movie that line is not uttered, but you get the drift). He admits his race is pacifist, which comes across in his inability to (initially) fire a weapon and his openness in giving detailed explanations about his solar system to an elderly couple in a diner over lunch. The two grow to have a good relationship that reminded me of something like a cross between Enemy Mine and Twins. Carlos Lauchu's Lekin was also entertaining in a manic way, laughing evilly when given the opportunity.

For a PM film, the special effects were actually extremely good. Of course we are used to PM pulling out all the stops when a car needs to blow up, but we had a few good alien spaceship shots, the Stargate-like portal, green blood and a few other other-worldy type effects. Colour me impressed, but this was better quality than most made-for-TV even today. 

The action? It's PM so there was a lot of it. There was and endless supply of cars running into other cars, or launching off other cars into trucks and choppers. A few buildings exploded, with the obligatory slow-motion jump from the fireball. Every second person had an automatic weapon and was not afraid to shoot it at somebody else with an automatic weapon. So suffice to say, there was plenty of action in Silencers to keep the audience enthralled. It also seemed to me that everybody was doing their own stunts, particularly Scalia. There were scenes where he was climbing all over a moving truck that definitely was no stunt double. He spent a few minutes hanging off the side off a tanker moving at high speed, shooting at enemy aliens. I couldn't see any harness and it was definitely not green-screen, so big props to Scalia and everyone else who had the guts to perform stunts in Silencers.

Overall this was one of the best PM films I've seen to date. The action was practically non-stop, the story and acting were of high quality and there was no dull parts (outside a few minutes at Rafferty's ex-wife's house - though this did get to show us Comdor relating to Rafferty's son). Definitely recommended for fans of science fiction with high action.

Highlight:

Outside the 14 or so cars that flipped, I think the highlight for me was the truck vs. helicopter chase that ended with Rafferty launching a car into the chopper, it crashing to the ground in flames.. and Rafferty walking away from the upturned car with barely a scratch. This is Die Hard territory, folks! 

Sourced From:

A very bad transfer on the Payless Entertainment R4 DVD that squishes Silencers with another PM film, Hologram Man, onto the one disc. This would be fine except they only used a single-layer disc, so the compression is severe and blocks up consistently. Best to buy another edition. Runtime approx. 100 minutes.

Trailer:

Maximum Conviction (2012)

 

Tagline:

Maximum security. Maximum firepower.

Movie Review:

Steven Seagal has released consistently watchable and enjoyable direct-to-video films for the past five years. Before that there were a few shaky ones, but with the possible exception of Against the Dark (his brief appearances in a vampire film) it's been a pretty good ride since 2007 with Renegade Justice aka Urban Justice, Pistol Whipped, Driven to Kill aka Ruslan, The Keeper, A Dangerous Man and Born to Raise Hell all being good to excellent DTV action films. Steven has been busy of late doing his TV series' Lawman and True Justice and I was wondering if we would get another film. Thankfully we did, and it's just as good as any of the others mentioned above. It's got action "newcomer" Steve Austin in it, and is directed by Keoni Waxman of Seagal's A Dangerous Man and Austin's Hunt to Kill fame.

It should be an easy day's work for Cross (Steven Seagal) and Manning (Steve Austin); overlook and orchestrate the closure of a military penal facility, and organise the transport of the final inmates to their new civilian prison. Cross shows who is boss early in the piece by beating up a 200kg inmate who steps out of line, while Manning is given the delightful task of running the garbage disposal. The day only gets worse when a rolled up note is found that was accidentally dropped by an inmate, detailing times and locations for an attack on the facility. Cross, on his way back to the prison and Manning, still dealing with that garbage disposal, are suddenly involved in a foothold situation as Chris Blake (Michael Pare) and his mercenaries, posing as marshalls, take over the complex in order to extract two of the prisoners - Samantha (Steph Song) and Charlotte (Aliyah O'Brien) - for their own purposes. And it's of course up to Cross, Manning and their phoned-in team of soldiers to sort this out!

The film is similar to Austin's own Tactical Force, except that in that film the good guys only had blank ammunition for training. Not so here; it's an automatic weapons festival! Being essentially one team of mercs. versus another team of mercs. you would expect this, and the film delivers in droves. Fast-firing rifles backed up with hand guns and even a few one-on-one close combat fights make this one of the more action-packed Seagal films in recent times. The dialogue is fairly light to accommodate the continual action; so much so that the only time I looked up at the clock was to see we were 70 minutes in and just about to kick into the final twenty minutes of yet more action and comeuppance for the bad guys.

Seagal and Austin share equal amounts of screen time here, which itself isn't dominating. A lot of the smaller players as well as Pare get their faces on camera. When Seagal and Austin do show up, they are almost always slap-fu'ing, drop-kicking, machine-gunning or launching fire extinguishers as rockets. Seagal appears to be doing most of the stunts himself this time round, which is great, and I doubt Austin even has a stuntman. The only real downside to the movie is the handful of occasions that Seagal speaks to Austin - their voices are both so low and gravelly I had a hard time trying to decipher what was being said!

Michael Pare is good fun as the renegade Chris Blake. It's good to see him taking time out from endless Uwe Boll films to join the big boys of action for a while. He's a little bit sadistic in getting what he wants, stabbing the poor warden in the hand and cutting off one of his fingers - ouch. Also on good form here is Australian actor Bren Forster as Bradley, who leads up Cross and Manning's squad of soldiers. Forster has some martial arts skills and gets to put them to use in a fight near the finale.

Overall this is one of the better DTV action films of the past few years. It's simple, it's direct and it never lets the plot get in the way of a good shootout. Just the way I like it! And there is more to look forward to as Steven Seagal teams up again with Director Keoni Waxman and co-stars Danny Trejo and Ving Rhames in Force of Execution!

Highlight:

There are no major highlights in the film as it is all fairly solid, but I especially enjoyed Steve Austin's various one-liners throughout the film. He breaks a guys elbow? "Does that hurt? You fuckin' pussy." He gets beaten up by a woman? "What the fuck, baby!" He impales a bad guy on a weights rack in the exercise yard? "No pain. No gain." Quality stuff!

Sourced From:

Ex-rental blu-ray from Transmission Films. Great picture and sound quality as can be expected from modern DTV on blu-ray.

Trailer: