The Eric Roberts Collection: Best of the Best II (dir by Bob Radler)

Posted on April 20, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Eric Roberts, Phillip Rhee, Simon Rhee, and Chris Penn all return for more martial arts action in 1993’s Best Of The Best II!

In the years since the American team’s quasi-victory over the Korean team in the first Best Of The Best, Travis (Chris Penn) has fallen on hard times. While his former teammates, Alex (Eric Roberts) and Tommy (Phillip Rhee) attend to the day-to-day operations of running a martial arts studio in Las Vegas, Travis spends his time fighting in underground “colosseum” matches. These matches, hosted by Weldon Mardano (Wayne Newton), are modern-day gladiatorial contests where the fighters often battle to the death while a bunch of rich people watch and cheer. (We can tell they’re rich because they all wear tuxedos). “There are no rules!” the crowd shouts as Travis defeats opponent after opponent.

Travis is convinced that he can defeat the colosseum’s German champion, fearsome Gustave Brakus (Ralf Moeller). It turns out that Travis is wrong. Travis loses to Brakus and is promptly killed after the crowd starts to chant, “Die! Die! Die!” (In Brakus’s defense, he may have thought they were just chanting, “The! The! The!”) (Actually, don’t ask me how that works in Brakus’s defense. I really didn’t think that joke through.) Travis’s death is witnessed by Alex’s young son, Walter (Edan Gross). Travis, Walter, and Tommy go on the run, ending up at Tommy’s boyhood home. Tommy, it turns out, is half-Native American and his bitter uncle, James (Sonny Landham), trains Tommy and Alex for their inevitable fight against Brakus. Dae-han Park (Simon Rhee) also shows up, saying that he owes Tommy a debt for not killing him at the end of the previous film.

Best of the Best II is an improvement on the first film, if just because it doesn’t take itself seriously at all and it cheerfully embraces and celebrates the absurdity at the heart of the storyline. Just the fact that one of the film’s villains is played by Wayne Newton should tell you everything you need to know about this film’s style. This is a pure Vegas film, full of glitz and neon and plenty of tuxedos. Eric Roberts even wears a tux at the end of the movie. Just as in the first film, Roberts does most of the acting while Phillip Rhee supplies the action. Roberts is a bit less emotional in this film. If he spent the first film continually on the verge of tears, he spends the second one trying not to smile at the silliness of it all. Towards the end of the film, you can actually see him starting to laugh at Wayne Newton’s over-the-top performance and it’s actually kind of a nice moment. Don’t take this too seriously, the film seems to be saying, We’re not! Just enjoy the fights!

Best of the Best II is definitely an improvement over the first one, even if it is unfortunate that neither James Earl Jones nor Sally Kirkland returned. (Then again, if you were the Tony-winning, widely-celebrated, universally-beloved, and very much in-demand James Earl Jones, would you have returned?) Best of the Best II doesn’t take itself too seriously and, as a result, it’s far more entertaining than you might otherwise expect.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Monsters 1.19 “Rain Dance”

Posted on February 7, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire show is streaming on Tubi.

This week, a rather predictable story is saved and elevated by one truly impressive monster!

Episode 1.19 “Rain Dance”

(Dir by Richard Friedman, originally aired on April 22nd, 1989)

Tonight’s episode of Monsters deals with a couple living in a shack in the middle of the desert. Tom Solo (Kent McCord) is a self-styled treasure hunter who thinks that he can get rich by swindling the indigenous people out of their valuable artifacts. His wife, Vanessa (Teri Copley), is sick of living in the desert and just wants to return to civilization. Vanessa is extremely vain. Tom is extremely smug. It’s easy to imagine how they got together but it’s bit more difficult to understand why they’re still together.

When an angry old woman (Betty Carvalho) shows up at the shack, she spends a few minutes yelling at Tom for trying to take advantage of her people and then complains about the drought that is destroying their land. She says that her people found and tamed the land and that some day, the land will again belong to them. She also gives Tom an artifact, a statue of what Tom assumes he’ll be able to get a few bucks for. Myself, I would probably turn down the statue because it is seriously creepy.

Yikes!

Of course, it turns out that Tom is wrong about having any chance of making money of the statue. The statue is a rain idol, one that comes to life in the middle of the night to stalk both Tom and his wife. When confronted by the statue, both Vanessa and Tom are transformed into statues that crumble into dust. The next morning, the old woman comes by to retrieve her idol and happily says that the rains will now come to wash away the dusty particles that were once the Solos.

Again, yikes!

Seriously, this was not a particularly complicated episode of Monsters. From the start, it was obvious that Tom and Vanessa were going to pay for their exploitation of the natives and it was also obvious that, since neither one of them had any redeeming qualities, neither would survive the night. And, as soon as the old woman showed up with that statue, it was pretty obvious what the instrument of their doom would be. Vanessa was established early on as being obsessed with keeping her skin from drying out in the desert heat so I wasn’t surprised when she eventually started turning into sand.

It wasn’t surprising but it still worked because the monster was scary!

Seriously!

The end result was an effective morality take about the perils of greed and assuming you’re more clever than you actually are. In many ways, this could have been a particularly macabre episode of The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery. Monsters is at its best when it offers a scary monster and a dark ending and this episode certainly did that.

Cleaning Out The DVR: Boulevard Nights (dir by Michael Pressman)

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(I recorded the 1979 film, Boulevard Nights, off of TCM on December 14th, 2017).

Boulevard Nights tells the story of two brothers, living in East Los Angeles.

Raymond Avila (Richard Yniguez) used to be involved with the street gangs but he’s gone straight. He still likes to cruise the boulevard. He still likes to make his lowrider hop up and down. He still knows better than to trust outsiders and he always makes sure that he’s not around whenever the cops show up. But, unlike many of his old friends, Raymond is now determined to stay out of trouble. He’s got a job working at a garage and he dreams of the day when he’ll have his own auto shop. He takes care of his mother. He keeps an eye on the neighborhood.

Chuco Avila (Danny De La Paz) is Raymond’s younger brother and also his opposite. Chuco is a high school drop out who doesn’t want to cause trouble but who says that he can’t stop getting angry. Chuco always carries a switchblade with him, even bringing it to a job interview. Chuco only feels secure when he’s a member of a gang. Chuco steals. Chuco fights. Chuco huffs paint and gets a snake tattooed on his arm. Whenever Chuco has to hide out, he goes to a graffiti-covered shack that he shares with a stray cat.

There’s a war coming as random skirmishes between two separate neighborhoods lead to greater and greater violence. Chuco is looking forward to it. Raymond just wants to avoid it. He’s got a good job and he’s planning on marrying Shady Londeros (Marta DuBois). But, as Raymond explains it to Shady, if a war does break out, he’s going to have his brother’s back.

The plot of Boulevard Nights is a familiar one. Stories about good and bad brothers have been told since ancient times and anyone who has ever seen a “gang” movie should be able to guess everything that’s going to happen in Boulevard Nights. It’s not a spoiler to say that the war between the two gangs leads to tragedy. You can see that tragedy coming from the first five minutes of the film. It also doesn’t take a psychic to predict that one brother will survive while one brother definitely will not. The only question is whether the film will end with either Raymond or Chuco wistfully staring out at the Los Angeles skyline.

What does set Boulevard Nights apart from other gang films is that it never glamorizes its violence and it was also shot on location in East Los Angeles. When Raymond and Chuco drive through their neighborhood, the small and dilapidated houses that they see are the houses that were actually there in 1979 (and which might still be there today). The use of real locations brought a grittiness to the film that the by-the-numbers script failed to provide. Boulevard Nights also featured a cast largely made up of amateurs. Members of the gang were played by actual gang members. Needless to say, this led to some noticeably uneven performances but it also created an authenticity that would otherwise be lacking.

Boulevard Nights is an uneven film but, because it was shot on location, it functions as a bit of time capsule. If you want to know what East L.A. looked (and sounded) like in the late 70s, you can either purchase a time machine or you can watch this movie. For many viewers, watching the movie will be probably be the more practical choice.

Last year, Boulevard Nights was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Horror Film Review: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (dir by Dominique Othenin-Girard)

Posted on October 27, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh … dammit.

Hi everyone! We are currently in the process of our annual horrorthon here at the Shattered Lens so I thought it would be a good idea if me and some of my fellow writers reviewed all of the Halloween films! Arleigh already reviewed the original Halloween back in 2010 and I took a look at the first sequel in 2012. So, it just made perfect sense to me that we go ahead and take a look at the rest of the films in the series!

Yesterday, Case reviewed Halloween 4 and, later, he’ll be taking a look at Resurrection and H20. Jedadiah Leland is taking look at Halloween 6 tomorrow. So, that leaves me with … *sigh* Halloween 5.

BLEH!

Before we dive into the crapfest that was Halloween 5, let’s take a look at the trailer! It’ll be fun!

The trailer’s actually fairly effective. I have to wonder how many people, way back in 1989, were fooled into seeing this film as a result of this trailer? I imagine probably more than who are willing to admit it. Paying money to see Halloween 5 doesn’t seem like something anyone would want to brag about.

Halloween 5 is the one that has the dumb cops. Now, I know that every Halloween film seems to feature at least a few dumb cops but the ones in Halloween 5 are really dumb. And they get their own theme music! That’s right — whenever these two dumb cops show up on screen, comedic circus music plays. Needless to say, it’s woefully out of place in a horror movie. I read that this was apparently meant to be an homage to the dumb cops from the original Last House On the Left. This despite the fact that … EVERYONE HATED THE DUMB COPS IN LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT!!! Even Wes Craven later said that the dumb cops were a mistake! If you’re going to rip off (or pay homage) to another movie, don’t pay homage to the part that sucked!

Anyway, you may remember that Halloween 4 ended with Jamie (Danielle Harris) attacking her mother and holding a knife. Uh-oh, looks like Jamie’s going to be a murderer! Well, no — that would have been too interesting. Halloween 5 finds Jamie being committed to a mental hospital for a year while Michael Myers (Don Shanks) is in a coma. Michael eventually comes out of his coma and starts stalking Jamie all over again.

Once again, Dr. Loomis (a depressingly frail Donald Pleasence) is one of the few people who realizes that Michael is still alive and once again, nobody is willing to listen to him. Here’s the thing: Dr. Loomis may be kinda crazy and yes, all the scars are kinda disturbing but he’s been right every single freaking time in the past. I understand that the people of Haddonfield are kind of in denial about Michael but this is just getting ridiculous.

Rachel Carrathurs (Ellie Cornell) returns for this movie but she gets killed early on. Apparently, she was killed so that the audience would know that anyone could be killed and that nobody was safe but Rachel was such a strong character and Ellie Cornell did such a good job playing her in the previous film that you really feel her absence in Halloween 5. Her death leaves a void that the film fails to adequately fill. Add to that, if you insist on killing a kickass character like Rachel, at least give her a memorable death scene. Don’t just have her blithely wandering around the house half-naked until she suddenly gets stabbed, as if she was just some generic slasher victim and not the lead of the previous movie.

With Rachel dead, it now falls to her amazingly annoying best friend, Tina (Wendy Kaplan), to serve as Jamie’s protector. Tina is hyperactive and talkative and quirky and blah blah blah. Basically, she’s like that person who is really annoying but since you’ve known her since the third grade, you feel obligated to hang out with her.

It all leads to another big Halloween party and few rather bloodless deaths. It’s all pretty boring, to be honest. There is one good scene where Michael chases Jamie in a car (the headlights cutting through the darkness create a wonderfully eerie effect) but, otherwise, it’s depressingly generic.

In the end, Michael is captured and put in a jail cell. Fortunately, a mysterious man in black shows up and breaks him out. Gee, I wonder what that’s about?

Halloween 5 is undoubtedly the worst of the Halloween films.

Bleh!