I definitely rented these types of movies and watched them on HBO in the ‘90s, and yet Arrow found six that are totally new to me. Since they were all shot on 35mm film, they hold up on Blu-ray and look more like real movies than some big studio fare now, let alone modern DTV.
Ministry of Vengeance stars John Schneider as a Vietnam veteran who becomes a minister. When his wife and daughter are killed by terrorists at the airport, he takes a military boot camp and goes to Lebanon himself. That airport shootout was full of extras even if it was on a set. The pyrotechnics are real and the plot would later be recycled by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Collateral Damage.
The Final Alliance is a David Hasselhoff vehicle. He’s doing a sort of Road House/Walking Tall where he comes to town and saves it from the bikers. He shoots a nunchuck apart and has a cougar for a pet, so the film really embraces the outrageousness of having no quadrants to please. He sets booby traps around his ranch, and the real stunts and explosions are really trying to show you something as wild as physically possible. The bad guys literally sit around laughing maniacally.
This has Interzone as a bonus feature. It’s full frame and standard definition, so this one really is DTV. The score is starting to sound familiar three movies in as it’s probably recycled. Interzone is a Mad Max knockoff and leans into the absurdity. Punks beat up a woman during a bar fight and the villain is a female bodybuilder.
R.O.T.O.R. seemed like a Robocop knockoff but it came slightly first. So the idea was just what if a robot cop was evil? This one has its own theme song, but it’s also the first one that lost me. Between an opening crawl, voiceover and really stretching the exposition scenes, it’s 40 minutes before R.O.T.O.R. is even born. Robocop built him up too but this ain’t Robocop.
Hangfire is a hostage crisis movie and the second appearance of James Tolkan, Yaphet Kotto, and George Kennedy in the same movie! They’re all in Ministry too.
Joshua Tree was the reason I wanted this set in the first place. I’d heard it’s one of Dolph Lundgren’s better vehicles. And it’s 2:35 so it was shot for widescreen. Lundgren plays an escaped convict on the run. He slides down rollers with double guns and on a mechanic dolly because America had just discovered John Woo. Lundgren would do Blackjack with Woo proper a few years later.
Where they found stars and filmmakers to interview, they seem to have the right mindset, knowing what these movies were but embracing them, not condescending or slumming it. Cult movie podcasters also do a good job with context between the movies in the set, and many that were not included. None claim these are undiscovered gems, but they explain the appeal.