Posts Tagged ‘DTV sequels’
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
Two years ago give or take a couple days I wrote about NEVER BACK DOWN as part of some back-to-school themed reviews. To commemorate the historic second anniversary of that review they have decided to make a part 2.
If you never saw the first one I forgive you. And I think you’re gonna be okay without it. Of the many mixed martial arts/underground fighting movies of the last few years it’s the slickest and most Hollywood. It’s the standard teen subculture movie but with MMA instead of breakdancing or BMX bikes or whatever. Troubled new kid in town wants girl, she belongs to popular rich bully who also is the king of a notorious underground fighting tournament. I can’t recommend it when BLOOD AND BONE, DAMAGE, UNDISPUTED II–III and FIGHTING have all come out in recent years, but I did sort of enjoy the absurdity of these allegedly high school age dudes having their own Kumite Lite.
NEVER BACK DOWN 2 is the DTV sequel and it happens to be directed by the star of two of the above-mentioned better underground fight movies, Mr. Michael Jai White. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: back to school, DTV sequels, DTV sequels better than theatrical originals, Evan Peters, Larnell Stovall, Michael Jai White, MMA, underground fighting
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 76 Comments »
Monday, May 30th, 2011
In the tradition of SNIPER and THE MATRIX RELOADED comes a movie that has the words SNIPER and RELOADED in the title. Actually this is the fourth entry in the SNIPER series and yet another example of the 21st century’s trend of surprised-they-made-this, not-bad, not-great DTV sequels.
Get it, though? For The Matrix it was a computer program or something that was reloaded, for Sniper it’s a gun.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy Zane, Chad Michael Collins, Claudio Fah, DTV, DTV sequels, John Fasano, Ross Helford
Posted in Action, Reviews | 34 Comments »
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
S.W.A.T.: FIREFIGHT is the straight to video sequel to the movie everybody kinda forgot about, based on the TV show that people only know of if they know the fucking awesome theme song. So before we get into this particular movie, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the one and only reason for the continued existence of the S.W.A.T. franchise of trademarked intellectual properties and likenesses and what not: (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Benny Boom, DTV, DTV sequels, Gabriel Macht
Posted in Action, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Sunday, February 13th, 2011
Lately alot of us have been noticing the decrease in high quality action movies on the big screen and the increase of them in the direct-to-DVD world. Some of us are starting to suspect that there’s been a switcheroo, that the DTV format – once designated as a 100% crap zone – has become the more reliable place to find good action movies. At least for English language movies it seems like most of the best ones (the UNDISPUTEDs, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER REGENERATION, BLOOD AND BONE) go straight to video, and anything on the big screen, even the ones I end up enjoying (THE EXPENDABLES, THE MECHANIC, NINJA ASSASSIN) you can pretty much 100% assume is gonna be compromised by some blurry, muddy, sloppy, close-up, confusing, de-thrillified action scenes.
Well, I’m not sure if we’ve reached that milestone yet, I might be cherrypicking my examples there. But add this to the evidence file: we got another DTV sequel that is clearly superior to the theatrical original. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Die Hard on a ____, DTV, DTV sequels, DTV sequels better than theatrical originals, Michael Rooker, Roel Reine, Ted Dibiase, Temuera Morrison, WWE Films
Posted in Action, Reviews | 68 Comments »
Saturday, December 18th, 2010
EPILOGUE:
I gotta tell you, I was surprised how much I liked HOUSE PARTY 4 (aka HOUSE PARTY 4: DOWN TO THE LAST MINUTE). A clever and meticulously constructed re-invention of the orig- Nah, just fucking with you. HOUSE PARTY 4 is a terrible movie. It’s the first in the series that’s at least as bad as I figured it would be, but not at all in the same way I thought it would be. It was made DTV in 2001 with the style and production value of some cable TV show made for 11-12 year olds (who would’ve been babies when the first HOUSE PARTY came out). In fact, I think the only thing making it higher than a PG rating is a song that plays on a radio that uses the word “pussy.” Otherwise it’s safe for Saturday morning TV. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels, sequel in name only
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
The original MIRRORS (Alexandre Aja’s American remake of the Korean movie INTO THE MIRROR) was a pretty good little b-movie. Kiefer Sutherland played a troubled night watchman at a fire-damaged department store who starts seeing creepy things in the building’s mirrors, causes his estranged wife to believe he’s lost his mind, solves a mystery and faces down a curse or something. But that story left alot of questions unanswered, for example “What if a different troubled individual worked as a night watchman in a different not-currently-open branch of the same department store chain where a different bad thing happened, so he has to solve a different mystery about what the mirror wants, and kind of on a smaller scale as if it were being filmed on a smaller budget?”
Well, wonder no more, friends. MIRRORS 2 answers that question with fierce adequacy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels, Nick Stahl, William Katt
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Friday, October 1st, 2010
Holy shit, all the sudden it’s October. And you know what that means, this is when I pretty much switch to an all horror programming lineup. I’m gonna be watching horror movies all month, and most likely failing to find a great ’70s or ’80s slasher movie I never saw before. (Don’t worry non-horror junkies, I still got some residual September viewing I haven’t written up yet, and I’ll do some new releases I’m sure.)
We’ll get into the good shit soon enough, but I remembered I had a review I was gonna send to Ain’t It Cool and hadn’t yet, might as well kick off the celebration with a not-very-anticipated DTV vampire sequel. I know in some cultures that’s considered bad luck, but to hell with it. I ain’t afraid of no curse. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels, vampires
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 37 Comments »
Friday, July 30th, 2010
BEST OF THE BEST 4: WITHOUT WARNING finds our hero Tommy Lee (still Phillip Rhee, also directing again) wandering into yet another action movie subgenre – this time he’s the reluctant badass who gets stuck trying to stop a plot by heavily armed, highly organized commandos. So it’s DIE HARD in a BEST OF THE BEST. In the three years since part 3 Tommy’s had a daughter and had a wife pass away. All he wants to do is bake his daughter a cake for her birthday, but coincidentally his friend at the mini-mart who he asks for baking advice has a computer expert daughter who’s fleeing from Russian counterfeiters with a disc they just stole. And of course Tommy ends up stuck with the disc and everybody trying to kill him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels, Ernie Hudson, Phillip Rhee, Sven-Ole Thorsen, Tobin Bell
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
BEST OF THE BEST 2 was an unexpected classic. The only slight hesitation I had was that he SPOILER killed the bad guy MORE SPECIFICS OF SPOILER at the end. I mean it was an evil guy, but the typical “he forced me to kill him” conclusion seems like kind of a cop out after part 1’s unorthodox peace and brotherhood ending.
Well, it turns out Tommy Lee (Phillip Rhee) agrees. Killing Brakus “went against everything I believe,” so he quit teaching, left Eric Roberts behind and seems to be driving across the country visiting his sister to rediscover himself, just like Seagal did at the beginning of MARKED FOR DEATH. Actually it’s weird because Tommy gets sideswiped and his car gets fucked up, which is a classic way of stranding an action hero drifter in the middle of nowhere to have an adventure. But then it turns out he was headed there anyway because that’s where his sister lives. This might be because it was originally written as a standalone movie but director/star Rhee had it modified to somewhat fit his BEST OF THE BEST character. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dee Wallace-Stone, DTV, DTV sequels, Gina Gershon, Phillip Rhee, R. Lee Ermey, white supremacists
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 14 Comments »
I know what you’re thinking: if I had remembered that there was a 
