The Eric Roberts Collection: Snow White: A Deadly Summer (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on April 18, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2012’s Snow White: A Deadly Summer, Snow (Shanley Caswell) is the teenage daughter of Grant (Eric Roberts). Snow has been acting out ever since her mother died and Grant married Eve (Maureen McCormick). Snow doesn’t feel that Eve loves her father and Eve is incredibly jealous of Snow. In fact, Eve spends a lot of time standing in front of a mirror and talking about how much she doesn’t like her stepdaughter.

One morning, after Eve has convinced Grant that Snow is dangerously out-of-control, Snow is abducted and taken to one of those awful boot camps. It’s the type of place where spoiled teenagers are taught discipline and good conduct. At least, that’s how it advertises itself. In truth, it’s a terrible place in the middle of the woods where the guards are sadists and no one is allowed the least bit of freedom. Eve is planning on having Snow murdered at the camp so that she can have Grant all to herself. Will Snow be able to escape?

Directed by David DeCoteau, this film doesn’t really have as much to do with Snow White as you might expect from the title. Yes, Eve spends a lot of time talking in front of the mirror but the mirror itself never talks back. That said, it’s actually a pretty entertaining film. Casting Maureen McCormick as the Wicked Stepmother is a brilliant move and McCormick seems to really get into playing a villain. (At times, she seems to be channeling Florence Henderson.) Even more importantly, the film exposes the whole boot camp racket. I can remember the old talk shows where out-of-control teens would be sent to “boot camp.” The audience would always go crazy whenever the “drill sergeants” started yelling at the teens but, to me, it always seemed like being sent to one of those boot camps would actually make someone ever angrier than they were before. That would certainly be true in my case.

I know what you’re saying, though. “Lisa Marie, what about Eric Roberts?” It’s interesting to see Eric Roberts playing a generally likable and sympathetic character here. He gets to do a bit more than he usually does in films like this and he give a good performance. You really worry about what’s going to happen to him when Maureen McCormick has him to herself.

The film ends with a nice little twist, though it’s probably one that you’ll see coming. That said, this is still one of David DeCoteau’s better films.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Review: Apostle (dir. by Gareth Evans)

Posted on April 18, 2026 by Arleigh

“She’s no god. She’s just a machine.” — Quinn

Apostle is one of those films that feels like Gareth Evans deliberately swerved away from the kinetic precision of The Raid and The Raid 2, as if to test whether he could still dominate the screen without back‑to‑back martial‑arts set pieces. The result is not a clean crowd‑pleaser, but a grim, blood‑soaked folk‑horror descent that trades velocity for dread, atmosphere, and the slow peeling away of civilized surfaces until what’s left is pure cruelty. It’s ambitious, dense, and at times unwieldy, but it is never the kind of hollow, algorithm‑friendly Netflix original that feels assembled by committee. The film leans into a slow‑burn approach, letting its cult setting and religious unease simmer before it erupts into something truly grotesque.

Set in 1905, Apostle follows Thomas Richardson, played by Dan Stevens with the exact right mix of haunted intensity and bruised arrogance, as he infiltrates a remote island cult to rescue his kidnapped sister. That setup sounds straightforward enough, but Evans uses it as a trapdoor into a much uglier story about faith, coercion, exploitation, and the grotesque systems people build when belief curdles into power. The cult is not merely spooky window dressing; it’s a functioning social organism with labor, hierarchy, punishment, and ritual, which gives the film a more grounded menace than a simple haunted‑house scenario. The island’s wrongness is not just in its rituals, but in the way ordinary domestic life has been turned into a kind of ongoing penance.

What makes Apostle compelling is how patiently Evans allows the island to breathe before he starts tearing it apart. The first half is almost methodical in the way it maps the place: the political tension within the cult, the uneasy alliances, the daily routines, the controlled scarcity, and the sense that every face hides some compromise. That slow construction is crucial, because once the film starts revealing what the island is actually built on, the horror lands with more force. It does not chase jump scares; it lets the audience sit inside the wrongness until the wrongness starts to feel inevitable. The film’s real horror is in the way it treats belief as a system of control rather than a source of comfort.

Michael Sheen is the other major pillar here, and he gives the film a wickedly slippery center as Malcolm, the island’s charismatic prophet. Sheen plays him as part messiah, part salesman, part exhausted tyrant, which is exactly the right tone for a character whose authority depends on performance. He isn’t merely loud or theatrical; he’s persuasive, and that is much scarier. The film understands that the most dangerous religious figures are often not the ones who snarl the loudest, but the ones who can make oppression sound like purpose. Dan Stevens plays beautifully against that energy, keeping Thomas in a state of wary observation until desperation forces him into action. The two actors give the movie a dramatic spine sturdy enough to support all the blood and theology around them.

Evans’ direction is, unsurprisingly, the film’s great technical asset. Even when Apostle feels overloaded, it never feels careless. He stages the island as an environment of mud, wood, fog, and decay, and his eye for spatial clarity keeps the film legible even when the narrative starts layering on secrets and hidden machinery. If The Raid was about velocity and geometry, Apostle is about pressure and contamination. The violence, when it arrives, still carries the director’s unmistakable talent for framing brutality on screen: every blow lands with a clarity and weight that makes the gore feel integral rather than gratuitous. But in Apostle he deftly dips his filmmaking talents into the world of gothic folk horror, slotting his sensibility alongside classics like The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, and The Witch. The island’s rituals, its mix of agrarian dread and religious paranoia, and its sense of a sealed community preparing for a bloody reckoning all echo those earlier works, while Evans colors them in his own grimy palette.

There’s also something interesting about how the film handles world‑building. It is overstuffed, yes, but it is overstuffed in a way that feels earned rather than random. The island has systems, factions, and ugly little bureaucracies of suffering, and the film keeps revealing new layers of control and corruption until the whole place feels like a machine designed to consume bodies and faith at the same time. Some viewers will see that density as a flaw, and they’re not entirely wrong; Apostle can feel a little overextended, as if Evans has too many ideas he wants to wring out of the same pressure cooker. But it could also be argued that the excess is part of the film’s personality. It’s not elegant horror. It’s horrified by its own abundance.

Thematically, Apostle works best when it treats religion not as a decorative taboo, but as a field of contesting desires. The film isn’t interested in simple anti‑faith provocation. Instead, it examines what happens when belief becomes a resource to be managed, weaponized, and monetized. The cult claims to reject corruption from the outside world, but its inner life is every bit as predatory, which makes the island feel less like an isolated aberration and more like a compressed version of the larger world Thomas came from. That’s one of the movie’s smartest ideas: the mainland and the island are different expressions of the same rot. The difference is only one of scale and visibility.

As a horror film, Apostle is strongest when it is patient and weakest when it has to juggle too many moving parts at once. The final stretch escalates into an effectively feral confrontation, but the movie occasionally risks losing the eerie precision of its setup in favor of sheer attritional chaos. Still, even that chaos has a purpose. Evans is not just trying to shock; he’s trying to show what happens when systems of belief collapse under the weight of their own lies. The result is messy, unpleasant, and often very good. It is also one of the more distinctive Netflix originals of its era, precisely because it refuses to be easy or tidy.

Apostle feels like a filmmaker known for kinetic precision making a movie about spiritual and social collapse, and the contradiction works in its favor. Even as he steps into the domain of gothic folk horror, Evans never loses his gift for filming violence or his sense of where the camera should sit in relation to pain. It has the rough edges of an ambitious film reaching for too much, but those edges are part of what makes it memorable. Part of the reason the film is underappreciated as quietly as it is may be that it arrived with a reputation attached: if Evans did not already have a name as a master of action filmmaking, Apostle might be celebrated more openly as a standalone horror achievement. Sometimes moving out of one’s comfort zone and still succeeding is exactly what gets held back by one’s reputation for what they’re “supposed” to be good at.

Between the bleak atmosphere, the commanding performances, the grim folk‑horror imagery, and Evans’ refusal to soften the ugliness of his subject, Apostle stands as a smart, vicious, and unusually committed piece of genre filmmaking. It may not be the Gareth Evans movie action fans expected, but it is very much the one horror fans deserved.

King of the Bullwhip (1950, directed by Ron Ormond)

Posted on April 17, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Tioga City has a problem. A masked outlaw known as El Azote keeps holding up James Kerrigan’s (Jack Holt) bank. Because El Azote carries a bullwhip, the case is assigned to Marshal Lash LaRue (Humphrey Bogart lookalike Lash La Rue) and his loyal sidekick, Fuzzy Q. Jones (Al St. John). Lash also always carries a bullwhip and because no one in town knows that Lash is actually a marshal, they all assume that he must be El Azote. Shady bar owner Benson (Tom Neal) offers to make a deal with Lash and Fuzzy but then he betrays them the first chance that he gets.

This is one of Lash La Rue’s better movies, which may sound like faint praise when you consider the quality of the typical La Rue film but this is actually a fairly engrossing production. Running under an hour, this Poverty Row western tells its story quickly and it ends with a genuinely exciting bullwhip battle. La Rue may not have been the best actor amongst the B-western stars of the era but he knew how to whip it and to whip it good.

The main attraction here is Tom Neal, playing another shady character. Tom Neal was a tough character both off-screen and on and he brings an authentic edginess to his character, one that was missing from most Poverty Row westerns. Tom Neal is best-known for starring in Detour. A former amateur boxer who hung out with gangsters and dated their girlfriends, Neal was an up-and-coming star until one day in 1951, when he beat up actor Franchot Tone so severely that Tone spent weeks in the hospital with a concussion. Neal’s career never recovered from the notoriety and he quit acting to become a landscaper. In 1965, he was back in the headlines after he was charged with murdering his wife. Convicted of involuntary manslaughter, he served six years in prison and died shortly after he was paroled. He was 58 years old.

Finally, King of the Bullwhip was directed by Ron Ormond, who will always be best known for films such as Mesa Of Lost Women and the infamous If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? It takes all types to make a B-western.

Guilty Pleasure No. 111: Out for Justice (dir. by John Flynn)

Posted on April 17, 2026 by Arleigh

Out for Justice is the kind of movie that leans so heavily on its star’s ridiculous swagger that it stops being merely bad and ridiculous and becomes entertaining in a “can’t‑look‑away from the car‑crash” sort of way. It’s not a polished or especially sophisticated action film, but it has a rough, gleefully over‑the‑top energy that makes it a perfect guilty pleasure, the kind of early ’90s action crime movie that works less because of craft and more because of attitude, bruises, and sheer confidence.

At its core, Out for Justice is a revenge story so simple it barely bothers pretending to be anything else. Steven Seagal plays Gino Felino, a Brooklyn cop chasing the man responsible for his partner’s death, and the plot mostly functions as a chain of excuses to send him from one grimy neighborhood stop to the next, collecting broken noses and wounded pride along the way. That stripped‑down structure is part of the movie’s charm, because there’s no attempt to dress it up with complicated twists or emotional depth; it’s all forward momentum, all hard stares, all macho problem‑solving by fist and elbow.

One of the things that gives Out for Justice its off‑kilter charm is how every actor in the cast seems to have read the script as an invitation to extremes. Performances swing violently between scenery‑chewing over‑the‑top theatrics and barely‑there, almost sleepwalking subtlety, with almost nothing in the middle. Either you’re shouting, staring down suspects inches from their faces, or you’re slouched in the background mugging in silence. It shouldn’t work, but the sheer imbalance in energy somehow makes the film feel like a live wire instead of a flat ’90s programmer.

Nowhere is that more obvious than with William Forsythe’s villain, Richie Madano, who plays the role so far “out there” that it’s hard not to wonder if he was actually on a lot of coke like the character was written to be. He leans into every sneer, every twitch, and every unhinged stare until he starts to look less like a character and more like a walking drug‑induced nightmare. There’s a manic, unpredictable edge to his performance that makes him feel genuinely dangerous, even when the dialogue around him is pure tough‑guy parody. It’s a kind of commitment that could easily tip into self‑parody, but Forsythe owns it so completely that he ends up grounding the film’s madness instead of derailing it.

What really makes Out for Justice memorable is how fully it leans into Seagal’s absurd screen persona. He’s at his best here when he’s acting like a man who believes every room belongs to him, and that attitude gives the movie a weird, shameless energy that a lot of his later work lacked. Even when the dialogue is clunky or the Brooklyn swagger feels more imagined than lived‑in, Seagal’s self‑serious delivery turns the whole thing into a performance art piece of tough‑guy certainty. The film is unintentionally funny at times, but that only adds to the appeal, because it makes the movie feel even more like a relic from a time when action stars could be gloriously excessive without irony.

The action is the main draw, and this is where Out for Justice earns most of its reputation. The fights have that satisfying, bone‑crunching roughness that makes the violence feel tangible instead of slick, and the movie keeps finding excuses to escalate from intimidation to outright brutality. Seagal’s style here is less flashy than some of his contemporaries, but that works in the film’s favor because the choreography has a mean, close‑quarters edge to it. The result is a movie that often feels like it’s trying to win by sheer stubbornness, and honestly, that suits it perfectly.

There’s also a strong sleaze factor running through the whole thing, and that’s another reason it works as a “bad but good” movie. The neighborhoods feel dirty, the criminals are exaggerated to the point of cartoonish menace, and the film’s idea of atmosphere is basically to keep everything sweaty, smoky, and angry. Forsythe’s villain, in particular, leans so extravagantly into that sleaze that he ends up giving the film a properly nasty center. A lot of the supporting characters are basically there to be insulted, questioned, or thrown into a wall, but the movie gets enough mileage out of that rhythm that it never really becomes boring.

Still, there’s no reason to pretend Out for Justice is secretly elegant. The script is thin, the character work is mostly functional, and the movie often feels like it was assembled to move from one confrontation to the next as efficiently as possible. Some of the scenes drag, and the film’s macho posturing can wear thin if you’re not already in the mood for this kind of energy. It also has that peculiar Seagal‑era problem where the movie wants him to be a street‑level man of the people, but the character sometimes comes across more like a self‑mythologizing neighborhood warlord than an actual human being. That disconnect is part of the fun, but it is still a disconnect.

What keeps Out for Justice from becoming a throwaway is the confidence behind the nonsense. It feels like a movie made by people who believed that attitude could substitute for sophistication, and in this case, they were mostly right. The pacing may be uneven, the story may be paper‑thin, and the acting may veer into laughable territory, but the movie never loses its nerve, and that gives it a strange kind of integrity. It doesn’t apologize for being dumb, and that unashamed commitment is exactly why it has aged into cult‑status entertainment instead of disappearing into the pile of generic action forgettables.

That’s why Out for Justice works so well as a guilty pleasure. It’s violent, ridiculous, and very much stuck in its own macho time capsule, but those flaws are inseparable from the appeal. The movie’s “bad but good” vibe comes from the way it accidentally becomes bigger and funnier than it likely intended, while still delivering enough real action‑movie satisfaction to justify the ride. It’s the kind of film that invites eye‑rolling and cheers in almost equal measure, and that balancing act is what makes it such a durable little cult object.

In the end, Out for Justice is not a masterpiece, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s a bruised, swaggering, over‑confident slab of early ’90s action cheese that knows how to sell its own nonsense with just enough force to make it lovable. To borrow from film reactor EOM Reacts (who is hilarious, by the way), “This whole movie screams cocaine.” If you want clean storytelling or nuanced performances, it will probably frustrate you. If you want a hard‑edged, trashy, surprisingly watchable Seagal vehicle that embodies the “bad it’s good” spirit—including a cast that either chews every morsel of the scenery or fades into the wallpaper—Out for Justice hits the mark.

Also, be on the look out for a quick cameo of Kane Hodder (who played Jason Voorhees for many of the franchise’s many sequels) as a gang member and for Dan Inosanto (teacher to Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris) as a character named “Sticks.”

Previous Guilty Pleasures

The Eric Roberts Collection: Freefall (dir by John Irvin)

Posted on April 16, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Who is Grant Orion?

That is the question at the heart of 1994’s Freefall.

Played by Eric Roberts, Grant Orion claims to be a former Hollywood stuntman who now spends most of his time jumping off of cliffs and skydiving. When photographer Katy Mazur (Pamela Gidley) first spots Grant, he is climbing to the top of a cliff in Swaziland and jumping off. Katy, who has been sent to the country to get a photograph of a taita falcon, finds herself obsessively snapping his picture. Later, after she meets Grant, she ends up cheating on her fiancé with him. The fiancé in question is Dex Dellums (Jeff Fahey), who is not only engaged to marry Katy but who is also her editor. He’s the one who sent her to Swaziland in the first place.

Who is Grant Orion? (And who, in the world, actually has a name like Grant Orion?) After Grant saves Katy from some gunmen, he explains that he’s not only a former stuntman but he’s also an agent of Interpol. However, Dex claims that Grant is lying. Dex tells her that Grant is a former stuntman who was run out of Hollywood after a stunt went wrong and now, he’s basically a mercenary. Katy doesn’t know who to trust as violence breaks out all around her.

Freefall starts out as a standard erotic thriller, with Roberts and Gidley exchanging smoldering looks and uttering heated dialogue. Before long, though, it turns into a thriller with Katy not being sure who to trust. There’s a lot of gunfire. There’s a lot of over the top action. Some of the scenes of action are so over-the-top that the film almost feels like it might be a parody. The plot itself is next to impossible to follow but who needs a plot when you’ve got Eric Roberts and Jeff Fahey sharing the screen together? Roberts is all smoldering intensity while Fahey seems to be having the time of his life playing the smarmy Dex.

Along with getting the best out of Roberts and Fahey. director John Irvin also manages to get some truly beautiful shots of the mountains of Swaziland. Though the scenes of Roberts climbing the mountains were clearly done by a real stuntman (and not Grant Orion), they’re still effectively shot. When we first see Grant jump off the mountain, the imagery is breath-takingly beautiful. At times, it’s hard not to regret that the entire film wasn’t just about Grant jumping off of mountains. All of the gunfire gets in the way of the main attraction.

Today, we’re so used to seeing Eric Roberts in small cameo roles that it’s easy to forget that he started out his career in starring roles. Freefall is a silly film but it’s undeniably entertaining, in the way that the best direct-to-video erotic action thrillers often were. Don’t even try to follow the plot. Just enjoy the mountains and the scenes of Roberts and Fahey competing to see who can out-smolder the other.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

El Paso Stampede (1953, directed by Harry Keller)

Posted on April 16, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

With the country distracted by the Spanish-American war, someone is stealing cattle on the border between Mexico and the United States. Federal marshal Rocky Lane (Allan Lane) is sent to investigate. He gets a job with Nugget Clark (Eddy Waller), a local feed merchant, and gets to know Nugget’s daughter, Alice (Phyllis Coates). As was usually the case with these B-westerns, it turns out that the band of onery outlaws is secretly being led by a villain who is an otherwise respectable member of society. When it comes to the Old West in these films, the biggest threat was not from the outlaws but instead from the greedy and corrupt settlers who wanted to get their own piece of the action and who were willing to sell out their own neighbors and sometimes their own country to get it. It falls to Rocky and Nugget to save the day, rescue Alice from the bad guys, and recover the cattle.

This was the last of the B-westerns to star Allan Lane as Rocky Lane and Eddy Waller as his sidekick. Unfortunately, the arrival of television made short programmers like this one obsolete. Kids could now just watch westerns on television instead of spending the day down at the theater. This was not a bad western for the Rocky Lane character to go out on, though. The plot is predictable but that’s to be expected for a 53-minute programmer like this one. However, Rocky is an appropriately square-jawed hero. He rides his horse, Black Jack, with authority and he looks convincing handling a gun and throwing a punch. There are actually some good shots involving the outlaws’s hideout, which just happens to be hidden behind a waterfall. For western fans, El Paso Stampede is a watchable and undemanding genre entry.

As I mentioned earlier, this was the last film to star Allan Lane. He appeared in a few more westerns after El Paso Stampede but it was always in supporting roles. Allan Lane appeared in 88 films, the majority of which were B-westerns like this one. Today, though, Lane is best-remembered for a role for which he wasn’t even given onscreen credit, providing the voice of the talking horse, Mr. Ed.

The Eric Roberts Collection: Law of Attraction (dir by Michael Kampa)

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2020’s Law of Attraction, Lexi Giovagnoli plays Allison Williams, a young attorney who is hoping to become a partner at her firm. The opposing counsel in her current case is named Derrick Walker. Allison hasn’t met Derrick but she has exchanged plenty of angry emails and had a few less than pleasant phone interactions with him. When Allison’s friend gets married, it seems like a good chance to Allison to get away from the daily grind of her job. And hey, there’s a cute guy at the wedding. His name is DJ (Joseph Almani)! Does anyone want to guess what the D in DJ stands for?

Law of Attraction is a cute movie. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the plot but Giovagnoli and Almani are both likeable and they have a sweet chemistry whenever they’re onscreen together. The weekend wedding leads to a lot of rehearsal shenanigans and some of them are funnier than others. For the most part, though, this is an enjoyable film. It’s the type of pleasant production that you can safely have running in the background while you take care of whatever else it is that you have to take care of during the day.

As for Eric Roberts, he makes a brief appearance as Allison’s boss at the law firm. It’s a cameo. Eric wears a suit and acts like a somewhat stuffy professional. He tells Allison not to screw up the case. It’s really a role that anyone could have played but I’m glad Eric Roberts picked up the paycheck.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Crossing The Line (2002, directed by Graeme Clifford)

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Laura Mosbach (Terry Farrell) is a former basketball player who is hired to be the assistant coach of the Lady Warriors, a high school team. When the beloved Coach Holliday (Lawrence Dane) has a stroke during a game, Laura becomes the new head coach and had to deal with parents who want to win at any cost, players who think they can bend the rules, and a town where no one has a private life. If you think it’s difficult being a new coach, try being a new coach who is publicly dating the father (Adrian Pasdar) of a player who you’ve just made a starter. Coach Mosbacher coaches the team her way, telling them that they are no longer Lady Warriors but now Women Warriors.

There are so many scenes in this movie that just get stuck in your head for the wrong reason. I enjoyed Laura getting so frustrated that she threw a box of cereal at a wall, where it exploded in slow motion. And there’s the scene where two basketball teams decide to just end the game rather than play the second half because the adults got into a fight in the school parking lot. I’m sure that’s a decision that many teenagers would make. It felt like one of those commercials for the Foundation For A Better Life. “Sportsmanship, pass it on!” Coach Mosbacher tells the girls that its their decision and is shocked when the the town wants to fire her as a result.

The movie’s most satisfying moment is one that isn’t meant to be satisfying. Adrian Pasdar punches out a ref who hasn’t gotten one call right the entire game. Who among us hasn’t been tempted to do the same? Let those without sin cast the first stone.

I actually agree with the movie’s message about parents putting too much pressure on their kids to win at any cost. Lawrence Dane was good as the beloved coach and so saw Adrian Pasdar, as the father who seemed nice but ultimately turned out to be even worse than the other parents. Terry Farrell, though, gave a one-note performance as Laura and the film’s plot had too many unbelievable moments to work.

Firefighter (1986, directed by Robert Michael Lewis)

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Nancy McKeon gives a good performance as Cindy Fralic, the first woman to become a firefighter in Los Angeles County. The film follows her as she takes the written exam, passes the physical exam (becoming the first woman to do so in the 60 years history of the Los Angeles Fire Department), and proves herself as both a firefighter and paramedic. She also finds love after her unsupportive husband divorces her.

Firefighter‘s story is bookended by a scene of Cindy telling a group of kids about what it is like to be a female firefighter. The film was made to inspire more women to pursue a career as a firefighter and sometimes, it seems like it pulls its punches when it comes to portraying just how difficult it probably was for the real-life Cindy to be Los Angeles’s first female firefighter. With the exception of her husband and one sexist captain, every man on the force is portrayed as being open-minded and rooting for Cindy from the start. No one at the firehouse has any trouble adjusting to a woman suddenly sharing their quarters. Almost everyone is supportive. The only time Cindy gets truly upset is when she has to get her hair cut. Sometimes, the film makes it seems like it was almost too easy for Cindy to be a groundbreaker.

It’s a good for what it is, though. Nancy McKeon gives a good performance. Ed Lauter plays her supportive boss and Amanda Wyss plays her best friend. It’s a made-for-TV movie so don’t go into it expecting a raging inferno. Instead, it’s just a sincere story about a woman who made history and who can maybe inspire others to do the same.

Rated X (2000, directed by Emilio Estevez)

Posted on April 13, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

In Rated X, two real-life brothers play another set of real-life brothers.

Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen play, respectively, brothers Jim and Artie Mitchell. Two pot-smoking entrepreneurs who found fame and fortune during the so-called Golden Age of Pornography (Behind the Green Door was their most famous film), Jim and Artie owned the O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco and became famous for their numerous legal troubles and their advocacy for freedom of speech. While Jim became a semi-respectable figure who hobnobbed with the city’s elite, Artie became known for his consumption of cocaine. In 1991, Jim drove over to Artie’s house and shot him twice. Jim, who claimed Artie had threatened to kill him, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison. Jim was released after serving three years. (He died in 2007, long after this film aired on Showtime.)

Rated X tells the story of the Mitchell Brothers in a flat and perfunctory manner. Emilio Estevez not only plays Jim but he also directs. He doesn’t bring much visual style or storytelling style to the film, despite a few scenes that appear to have been cribbed from Boogie Nights. Estevez doesn’t seem to be sure what he wants to say about the Mitchell Brothers and they come across as being the most boring pornographers in history. What’s really strange is that Estevez and Sheen are not believable as brothers, despite both wearing matching bald caps. There’s nothing about their performances that would lead you to believe that they grew up with each other. Casting Sheen as an out-of-control drug addict seems like a no-brainer but he’s not even believable when he’s snorting coke and handing out cheerleader uniforms. In fact, the film probably would have worked better if Sheen and Estevez had switched roles. Estevez was always better at showing emotion than Charlie. In Rated X, Jim is always intense while Artie always has the wide-eyed stare that Oliver Stone made such good use of in Platoon.

I can understand the casting, though. Jim and Artie were brothers so it makes sense to cast brothers to play them. Because Charlie has always been best-known for his flamboyant life off-screen, it probably seemed to the obvious decision to cast him as the wild brother while Estevez, who has always come across as being a stable guy offscreen, seemed right for Jim. But onscreen, Estevez is always better as an unpredictable outlaw and Charlie is always better as someone who tries to keep his real emotions bottled up. This film was cast based on Estevez and Sheen’s off-camera personas and they’re both miscast as a result.

There’s an interesting movie to be made about the Mitchells. Their rise and fall mirrored the rise and fall of the 6os counterculture. (A year before he killed his brother, Jim even tried to launch a Ramparts-style magazine for the 90s.) Unfortunately, the Showtime-produced Rated X is not it.