An Eric Roberts Holiday Film Review: A Karate Christmas Miracle (dir by Julie Kimmel)

Posted on December 15, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2019’s A Karate Christmas Miracle, young Jesse Genesis (Mario Del Vecchio) believes that if he can become a black belt in four days, his father — who has been missing for a year — will return home. Jesse’s mother, Abby (Mila Milosevic) tries to get Jesse to understand that his father was abducted and probably murdered by a killer clown. Eventually, trying to understand what happened to her husband, Abby teams up with Elizabeth (Julie McCullough), a quirky law professor who is also psychic.

This is a strange film. Eric Roberts and Martin Kove are listed as co-starring in the film but actually, all of their footage appears to have been lifted from 2015’s Joker’s Poltergeist, a film that stylistically and thematically has next to nothing in common with A Karate Christmas Miracle. Scenes of Jesse practicing karate and trying to work his way up to black belt in just six days are mixed with scenes of Eric Roberts threatening to kill people and Martin Kove rambling about he wants to leave a movie theater to his daughter. The scenes just don’t mix but they do show that if Eric Roberts and Martin Kove aren’t available to do your bad movie, you can just lift scenes of them from an even worse movie.

Sitting through A Karate Christmas Miracle is a bit of a struggle. It’s only 81 minutes long but every scene still goes on for too long and the dialogue is full of overly quirky moments that probably sounded great in the writer’s head but which play out very awkwardly on film. This movie really made me appreciate films that are actually edited in a professional manner. We tend to take good editing for granted. This movie reminds us not to.

Now, to be honest, the story did have some potential. A child is so desperate for his father to return that he sets an impossible goal for himself. Seriously, in the right hands, this could have been a real tearjerker. But everything about A Karate Christmas Miracle just feels off. The film works itself towards an heartfelt ending that it really hasn’t earned.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about this film is that it’s still better than Joker’s Poltergeist.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

October Positivity: I’m In Love With A Church Girl (dir by Steve Race)

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2013’s I’m In Love With A Church Girl, future Fyre Festival promoter Ja Rule stars as Miles Montego.

Miles is wealthy and powerful and glamorous and he owes it all to his career as a drug dealer. However, at heart, he’s still a good son who loves his mother and who worries about disappointing her with his criminal lifestyle. His mother is big into church and she wants Miles to settle down with a good Christian girl. Miles is like, “It’ll never happen.” But then, at a party thrown by his accountant (Vincent Pastore), Miles meets and falls for Vanessa Leon (Adrienne Bailon). Vanessa is a …. wait for it …. church girl!

Falling in love with Vanessa changes Miles. He realizes that there’s more to life than just making money and hanging out with the members of his drug-dealing crew. He goes to church with Vanessa and is shocked to discover that the preacher owns a nice suit and drives a fancy car. The preacher explains that it’s not a sin to by stylish. Tell that to the Amish, preach.

Anyway, Miles may be finding God but the DEA still wants to take down Miles and his crew. Martin Kove appears in one scene as the DEA supervisor who orders Stephen Baldwin and Michael Madsen to make Miles their number one priority. Madsen isn’t in much of the film but Baldwin makes many appearances, popping up regularly to remind us that Miles is still under surveillance.

Miles’s new-found faith is tested when his mother dies. Then, when Vanessa ends up in the hospital, Miles really struggles. If you’ve ever wanted to see Ja Rule deliver an angry and impassioned monologue about faith, I’m In Love With A Church Girl is the film for you!

To give credit where credit is due, I’m In Love With A Church Girl was clearly made with the best of intentions. The film was written by Galley Molina, a real life former drug dealer who later became a preacher. Molina reportedly based the film on his own life story and the end result is an very earnest film that does seem to believe it’s own message. That’s a good thing.

The bad thing is that the film, with its 2-hour running time, is almost painfully slow and the rather simple story is stretched so thin that the film itself becomes a bit of an endurance test. The other problem is that Ja Rule is, to put it charitably, not a very good actor. He sleepwalks through the film with a somewhat dazed expression on his face, projecting little of the charisma that you would probably need to get an otherwise sensible person like Vanessa to overlook your drug dealing career. He certainly doesn’t have the screen presence to carry a two-hour film and he big dramatic monologue is more likely to inspire laughter than tears.

(It doesn’t help that it’s hard to look at him without thinking about him bragging about how great the Fyre Festival was going to be.)

The film is so well-intentioned that I kind of hate to be critical of it but I’m In Love With A Church Girl doesn’t really work.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The Last House On The Left (dir by Wes Craven)

Posted on October 1, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The year is 1972 and the news is grim. The fighting continues in Vietnam. The protests continue at home. Crime is rising. The economy is struggling. Groups like the Weathermen and the SLA are talking about taking the revolution to the streets. In New York, the notorious murderers Krug Stillo (David Hess) and Fred “Weasel” Podowksi (Fred Lincoln) have broken out of prison and are one the run. They are believed to be traveling with Krug’s drug-addicted son, Junior (Marc Sheffler), and a woman named Sadie (Jeramie Rain), who is said to be feral and bloodthirsty.

However, Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassel) doesn’t care about any of that. She’s just turned seventeen and she can’t wait to go to her first concert with her best friend, Phyllis (Lucy Grantham). Mari is naive, optimistic, and comes from from a comfortably middle-class family. Phyllis is a bit more worldly and tougher. As she explains it, her family works in “iron and steel.” “My mother irons, my father steals.”

While Mari’s parents (Richard Towers and Eleanor Shaw, though they were credited as Gaylord St. James and Cynthia Carr) bake a cake and prepare for Mari’s birthday party, Mari heads into the city with Phyllis. Before they go to the concert, they want to buy some weed. When they see Junior Stillo hanging out on a street corner, they assume he must be a dealer and they approach him. Junior takes them to an apartment, where they are grabbed by Weasel and Krug.

1972’s The Last House On The Left was advertised with the classic (and much-repeated line), “To avoid fainting, keep repeating, ‘It’s only a movie …. it’s only a movie…. it’s only a movie….” That advice is easy to remember during the first part of the film because, up until Mari and Phyllis approach Junior, the movie is fairly cartoonish, with Richard Towers giving an incredibly bad performance as Mari’s father. This film was Wes Craven’s debut as both a director and a writer. By his own admission, Craven had no idea what teenage girls would talk about and, as such, he just wrote a lot of dialogue in which Mari talked about her breasts and Mari’s mother complaining that young women no longer wore bras. (On the commentary that he recorded for the film’s DVD release, Craven succinctly explained, “I guess I was obsessed with breasts.”) This part of the film plays out like a weird counter-culture comedy. Even when we first meet Krug, he’s using his cigar to pop a little kid’s balloon.

The Last House On The Left (1972, dir by Wes Craven, DP: Victor Hurwitz)

The tone of the film jarringly shifts the minute that Mari and Phyllis step into that apartment. That’s largely due to the performances of David Hess and Fred Lincoln, who are both so convincing in their roles that it can be difficult to watch them. In real life, Fred Lincoln was a stuntman (he’s in The French Connection) and an adult film actor. David Hess, meanwhile, was a songwriter who was looking to break into acting. (Hess’s songs — some of which are beautifully sad and some of which are disturbingly jaunty — are heard throughout the movie.) Hess, in particular, is so frightening as Krug that he spent the rest of his career typecast as sociopathic murderers. The middle part of the film alternates between disturbingly realistic scenes of Mari and Phyllis being tortured and humiliated and cartoonish scenes involving two incompetent cops (one whom is played by Martin Kove) and Mari’s parents. Phyllis is murdered and dismembered in a graveyard and the gore effects remains disturbingly realistic even when seen today. Mari, after being raped by Krug, recites a prayer, and then wades into a nearby lake. Krug shoots her three times. Afterwards, Krug, Weasel, and Sadie try to wash the blood off of themselves, the expression on their faces indicating that even they understand that they’ve gone too far.

Eventually, Krug, Weasel, Sadie, and Junior stop off at a nearby house, claiming to be salespeople who just had a little car trouble. What they don’t realize is that the people who are generously welcoming them to spend the night are also the parents of Mari Collingwood….

Basing his script on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Wes Craven has often said that The Last House On The Left was meant to be a commentary on the Vietnam War and the way that other films had glamourized violence. That may or may not be true. (Craven has also said that, at the time, he was so desperate to direct a movie that he would have filmed almost anything.) What is true is that the violence in Last House On The Left is not easy to watch. Once it starts, it’s relentless and, at no point, is the audience given an escape. David Hess is so committed to playing a sadist that he never takes a moment to wink at the audience and say, “Hey, we’re just playacting here!” Craven shot the film in a guerilla style and the shaky camera, the natural light, and the grainy images leave you feeling as if you’re watching some sicko’s home movies. At the end of the movie, when Mari’s parents take the same joy in attacking her killers as Krug took in attacking their daughter, it’s hard not to feel that Mari has been forgotten. Everyone has been consumed by the violence that has erupted around them. Even though Richard Towers’s nearly blows the ending with a few hammy line readings, the film still leaves you exhausted.

The Last House on the Left (1972, dir. by Wes Craven, DP: Victor Hurwitz)

Not surprisingly, The Last House On The Left was attacked by most reviewers when it was originally released. The movie played the drive-in and grindhouse circuit for three years, with producer Sean Cunningham often taking out advertisements in local newspapers that read: “You will hate the people who perpetrate these outrages—and you should! But if a movie—and it is only a movie—can arouse you to such extreme emotion then the film director has succeeded … The movie makes a plea for an end to all the senseless violence and inhuman cruelty that has become so much a part of the times in which we live.” The film’s advertisements also contained a warning that no one under 30 should see the movie. Needless to say, The Last House On The Left was a huge hit, especially with viewers under 30.

(One of the great ironies of film criticism is that one of the few critics to defend Last House On The Left was Roger Ebert. Ebert, who would later be one of the slasher genre’s biggest attackers, gave Last House On The Left a very complimentary review and praised it for its political subtext.)

Seen today, The Last House On The Left still packs a punch. It’s a shocking and shamelessly sordid film, one that shows hints of the talent that would make Wes Craven one of the most important directors to work in the horror genre. It’s flawed, it’s exploitive, it’s thoroughly unpleasant, and yet it’s also a film that sticks with you. It’s powerful almost despite itself. It’s not a movie that I would necessarily chose to watch on a regular basis but, at the same time, I can recognize it as being a historically important film. For better or worse, much of modern American horror owes a debt to Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left. Even today, when one is regularly bombarded with horrific images, Last House On The Left still has the power to shock.

Happy 78th Birthday, John Kreese (Martin Kove)! In honor of you, I celebrate one of my favorite scenes!

Posted on March 6, 2025 by Bradley Crain

It would be hard to overstate how much I loved THE KARATE KID (1984) when I was growing up. The movie came out when I was 10 years old, and I think it would be fair to say that I wanted to be the karate kid. I was a scrawny little runt, and the whole storyline about getting the better of the big bullies appealed to me. Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita will always be special to me because of their roles as Daniel LaRusso and Mr. Miyagi. It’s also fair to say that my very first movie crush was Elizabeth Shue. I thought she was so beautiful as “Ali with an I,” and I still do!

It was so easy to hate Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and his band of bullies. The show, COBRA KAI, has finally helped me get over my anger at them. And then there’s Martin Kove as John Kreese, the head of that snake that was cobra kai. He is such an asshole in the movie! When I saw it was his birthday, I had an excuse to share one of my favorite scenes in cinema!

Happy Birthday, Martin Kove! Enjoy, my friends!

Top Of the World (1997, directed by Sidney J. Furie)

Posted on February 13, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Ray Mercer (Peter Weller) has just gotten out of prison and already, he and his wife Rebecca (Tia Carrere) are heading to Nevada for a quicky divorce. However, a stopover in Las Vegas leads to Ray having a run of luck in a casino owned by Charles Atlas (Dennis Hopper). Ray and Rebecca start to reconsider their divorce but their reconciliation is temporarily put on hold when the casino is robbed by a bunch of thieves led by Martin Kove. Because of Ray’s criminal history, the police (led by David Alan Grier) consider Ray to be the number one suspect. Ray and Rebecca try to escape from the casino and clear Ray’s name, leading to a night on nonstop action and an explosive climax at the Hoover dam.

One thing that you can say about Top of the World is that it certainly isn’t boring. The action starts earlier and lasts nonstop until the end of the movie. No sooner has Ray escaped from one scrape than he finds himself in another. Despite the low-budget, the action scenes are often spectacularly staged and exciting to watch. Another thing that you can say about Top of the World is that, for a B-movie, it certainly has a packed cast. Along with Weller, Carrere, Hopper, Grier, and Kove, the movie also finds room for Peter Coyote, Joe Pantoliano, Ed Lauter, Gavan O’Herlihy, Eddie Mekka, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and even Larry Manetti of Magnum P.I. fame. This movie paid off a lot of mortgages and probably funded more than a few vacations.

One thing you can’t say about Top of the World is that it makes any sense. It doesn’t. There are so many holes in the plot that you could fly a helicopter through them and that’s exactly what this film does. But with the nonstop action and the entertaining cast, most people won’t mind. I certainly didn’t!

Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 3.8 “Hot Wheels”

Posted on February 11, 2025 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 Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

Last night’s review of CHiPs was pre-empted by a sudden storm. Here it is now, in its entirety,

Episode 3.8 “Hot Wheels”

(Dir by John Florea, originally aired on November 3rd, 1979)

Ponch is still in the hospital, recovering from last week’s accident. Still, because he’s Ponch, he’s the one who figures out that a bunch of disgruntled fireman are using city trucks to commit their jewelry thefts. Hey, wait a minute. Last week’s episode was also about jewelry thefts. Admittedly, CHiPs was a show that tended to recycle plots but, even by CHiPs standards, this is one of those coincidences that leaves you wondering what exactly was going on in the writer’s room.

Actually, it’s easy to guess. Erik Estrada really was injured while filming an episode. The cast that he wears throughout this episode was real and, as easy as it can be to make fun of his overexpressive acting and his tendency to lose his shirt every other scene, you do have to respect that Estrada showed to film this episode at all. With Estrada injured, one gets the feeling that this episode, just like last week’s, was quickly rewritten to cover the situation.

Baker gets a temporary partner in this episode. It’s the return of his former motorcycle mate, John Clayton! Clayton was apparently Baker’s partner before Ponch. Clayton has a reputation for being a practical joker, It’s all anyone can talk about. Clayton is a legendary prankster! They really want us to know that Clayton’s a fun guy before he shows up and we discover that he’s played by Andrew Robinson, the actor who is best-known for playing the Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry. Robinson wears a mustache as Clayton, probably in an attempt to keep 1979 audiences from looking at the screen and going, “Hey, I remember that guy hijacking a school bus!”

(I should mention that Andrew Robinson himself was a committed pacifist when he filmed Dirty Harry, to the extent that he actually flinched whenever he had to shoot the killer’s gun and he actually traumatized himself while filming the school bus hijack. He actually sounds like a pretty nice guy who just happened to play one of the most loathsome screen villains of all time.)

Baker works with Clayton and it must be said that Larry Wilcox does seem to be noticeably happier when he’s acting opposite Robinson than he ever did when he was acting opposite Estrada. The episode features Clayton performing a heroic and dangerous rescue at one point and it’s easy to see that that scene was originally conceived with Estrada in mind. It’s also easy to imagine Estrada flashing his big grin at the end of the scene while Robinson, on the other hand, plays up the fact that anyone, even a dedicated cop, would be absolutely exhausted after all that.

Robinson does a good job as Clayton and it’s always fun to see Martin Kove play a villain on show like this. This was a good episode. Estrada, I assume, will be back on his bike next week.

Happy Birthday to actress Jan Gan Boyd, Charles Bronson’s co-star in ASSASSINATION (1987)!

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Bradley Crain

I wanted to take a moment and show some appreciation for actress Jan Gan Boyd on her birthday. Jan has been a part of my life since I was 13 years old since she co-starred with Charles Bronson in the 1987 Cannon film ASSASSINATION.

In a nutshell, the plot of ASSASSINATION revolves around secret service agent Jay Killian (Bronson), who finds himself in the position of trying to protect an extremely strong-willed first lady (Jill Ireland) from assassins trying to kill her. Jan plays Charlotte “Charlie” Chang, a member of the team assigned to protect the first lady, who has an extra special relationship with Killian. And while ASSASSINATION is not one of Charles Bronson’s best movies, I always liked Jan in the film. She had spunk and attitude, and her relationship with Bronson’s character is definitely unique in Bronson’s 80’s filmography. Believe it or not, Killian and Charlie had casual sex, and she survived the end of the movie to talk about it! As a matter of fact, her exchange with Killian the next morning leads to one of the great moments of Bronson dialogue:

Charlie Chang: “Killy, why don’t you move in here permanently?”

Jay Killian: “I don’t want to die of a terminal orgasm!”

I guess lines like that bond actors for life and Jan stayed friends with Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland all the way up to each of their deaths.

Jan got her start in the movies through her abilities as a trained dancer when she co-starred with Michael Douglas in the 1985 film, A CHORUS LINE, directed by Richard Attenborough. I think she’s one of the best characters in the film. And 1987 was a very busy year for Jan. After filming ASSASSINATION with Bronson, she would co-star with Martin Kove in the film STEELE JUSTICE, and then with David Soul in HARRY’S HONG KONG. She would spend the next few years of her career doing guest spots on shows like CHEERS, SISTERS, and SILK STALKINGS. It was at this point that she took a break from her career to get married and raise a family. Over the last few years, she has started to get involved in voice-over work, as well as appearing on shows like “Dance Dish,” where she discussed her time as a dancer and her work on A CHORUS LINE.

On a personal note, I must say that Jan Gan Boyd is one of the sweetest ladies I’ve ever met. My partner Eric Todd and I got the opportunity to interview her for an episode of the THIS WEEK IN CHARLES BRONSON podcast a couple of years ago. She told us some of the best stories about Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland, as well as what it was like to work with them on ASSASSINATION. She truly loved them in real life, and it was so fun sharing that time with her. As a matter of fact, over on our TWICB Facebook page, every January is now Jan-Gan-uary! I’ve attached a link to the podcast episode if you would like to hear more from Jan about her career and her work with Bronson, Michael Douglas, and Richard Attenborough.

#MondayMuggers – Why DEATH RACE 2000?

Posted on December 2, 2024 by Bradley Crain

Every Monday night at 9:00 Central Time, my wife Sierra and I host a “Live Movie Tweet” event on X using the hashtag #MondayMuggers. We rotate movie picks each week, and our tastes are quite different. Tonight, Monday December 2nd, we’re watching DEATH RACE 2000 starring David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone, Simone Griffith, Mary Woronov, Roberta Collins, and Martin Kove.

So why did I pick DEATH RACE 2000, you might ask? It’s pretty simple. I think it will be a fun movie to watch with a group. Unlike most of my choices, which are movies I’ve seen many times, I’ve only seen DEATH RACE 2000 one time before and it’s been awhile. I’m looking forward to seeing it again myself. I like that it’s a B-movie from legendary producer Roger Corman. That’s usually a good thing. I like that it’s directed by Paul Bartel. Bartel’s EATING RAOUL was one of those movies that helped me appreciate black comedy when I was growing up. I really like the cast, especially David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone. And finally, I like that it’s 80 minutes long. In today’s world where every film feels the need to be between 2 and 3 hours, I’ve grown to really appreciate movies clocking in at 90 minutes or less!

It’s on Amazon Prime and Tubi. Join us if you’d like!

The Eric Roberts Collection: The Savant (dir by Sherri Kauk)

Posted on May 1, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I swear, I will sit through the worst films for the promise of an Eric Roberts cameo.

Roberts is only featured in about two minutes of 2019’s The Savant. According to the credits, he was playing a character named Lonnie. At one point, he called the film’s hero, police officer Nick Tantino (Frank Giglio), and had a nonsensical conversation with him while he was arresting a random person. I’m not really sure who Lonnie was supposed to be and the scene had very little to do with the film’s story. In fact, the scene just randomly occurred. I’m going to guess that the film needed to be padded out and someone said, “Let’s call Eric Roberts and add another name to the cast.”

Eric Roberts is not the only familiar face to show up in the film.

Martin Kove plays a literature professor who is also a sensei. One of his former students, an evil District Attorney named Zane Carroll (played by Eric Etebari), calls him for advice.

Former TV actress Joyce DeWitt plays a detective. Her partner, who tells a lot of bad jokes, is played by comedian and former Howard Stern flunky, Jackie Martling.

Veteran genre actress Julie McCullough plays a judge, who screams at a defense attorney.

Thomas G. Waites, who was one of The Warriors, plays a police chief.

Robert Loggia shows up as Dr. Reno, a psychiatrist who bellows at everyone and who explains how the savant mind works. Of all the “names” in the film, Loggia gets the most screentime. Interestingly enough, Loggia died in 2015 and The Savant was released four years later. I’m not sure when The Savant was actually filmed but considering how messy the film is and how many plot points are brought up and then abandoned and also the fact that the characters often look totally different from scene-to-scene, I’m going to guess shooting went on for a while.

As for the film, it’s about an autistic savant named Anthony (Miguel Jarquin-Moreland) who beats up a bully. Nick, who has been assigned to work as a glorified security guard at Anthony’s high school, takes Anthony under his wing and trains him to be a MMA fighter. It turns out that the secret of communicating with Anthony is to speak to him in Spanish so we get several scenes of Nick calling him a “pendejo” in order to get Anthony to fight. The entire film builds up to a cage match between Anthony and his bully just for Nick to suddenly cancel the match and instead enter the ring to fight Zane, who is not just a district attorney but also the sensei of his own karate school.

Zane is determined to not only defeat Nick in the ring but to also destroy Nick’s career by telling the police about the time that Nick killed two men in Italy. The murders are not in the record because, according to Zane, they happened “before we had international law.” What? Anyway, Zane decides to create a false criminal record for Nick because Zane is jealous over the fact that Nick is falling in love with Anthony’s sister, a defense attorney named Cassy (Suzy Kaye). Zane even sleeps with Nick’s ex-wife to get revenge. Seriously, I love the fact that Zane is both a prosecutor and a sensei. I mean, how does he find the time?

There’s a lot of plot in this movie. None of it really makes sense but it’s hard not be amused at just how incoherent it all is. The film is full of random and seemingly unrelated scenes, like a lengthy sequence where a defense attorney argues that his client, a doctor, was performing euthanasia when he shot three heroin addicts in the head. “Free Dr. Clark!” the courtroom crowd chants. (Of course, Dr. Clark is never again mentioned after this scene. The shouts of “Free Dr. Clark” brought to mind the “Free Hat!” episode of South Park.) The Savant plays out like a fever dream, one that dares you to try to make sense of it all.

Well, good luck with that. I could sit here and spending hours write about all of the film’s plot holes. But what’s important is that this film featured a lot of Robert Loggia yelling and about two minutes of Eric Roberts. Plan accordingly.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

The TSL Grindhouse: Project Shadowchaser (dir by John Eyres)

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1992 film, Project Shadowchaser, takes place in the near future. It’s a time when cyborgs are a common sight and criminals are frozen and sent to a cryogenic prison. At the same time, it’s close enough to the present that the FBI is still America’s main law enforcement agency and the President is still a powerful enough figure that terrorists would want to abduct his daughter. It’s also close enough to the present that terrorists are still learning how to do their job from watching Die Hard.

Romulus (Frank Zagarino) is a cyborg who takes a hospital hostage, all to track down the president’s daughter, Sarah (Meg Foster). The FBI feels that only the hospital’s architect, Mr. Dixon, can figure out the best way for the FBI’s strike force to enter the hospital. Unfortunately, Mr. Dixon broke the law and has been put on deep freeze. When the stoner who runs the cryogenic prison is told to thaw out Mr. Dixon, he screws up and accidentally unfreezes DeSilva (Martin Kove), a former football quarterback.

Knowing a good thing when he sees it, DeSilva pretends to be Dixon but, once he and the strike force enter the building, it become apparent that DeSilva/Dixon has no idea what he’s talking about. All of the members of the strike force are killed when an elevator explodes. Only DeSilva survives and now, whether he wants to or not, he’s going to have to battle the terrorists and save the President’s daughter! It’s a good thing that she’s a football fan.

What a dumb movie this turned out to be! Seriously, you can add all of the sci-fi elements to your Die Hard rip-off that you want to, a Die Hard rip-off is still a Die Hard rip-off and it’s hard to think of any other film (with the possible exception of No Contest) that so slavishly follows the Die Hard formula. There’s nothing particularly surprising to be found in Project Shadowchaser. The minute that Kinderman (Joss Ackland) shows up and declares that he’s taking over the operation from FBI agent Trevanian (Paul Koslo), it’s obvious that he’s going to turn out to be the one behind Romulus’s actions. And from the minute that DeSilva meets Sarah, it’s obvious that they’re destined to fall in love.

I like Martin Kove on Cobra Kai and Kove brings a similar self-awareness to his role as DeSilva. At times, Kove appears to almost be winking at the audience, as if he’s saying, “Hey, I can’t believe I’m in this movie either. What are you going to do?” Unfortunately, Kove often seems to be the only person in the film who is really in on the joke. Needless to say, Project Shadowchaser is no Cobra Kai.

That said, I did appreciate the fact that the film’s entire plot hinged on a government employee accidentally unfreezing the wrong guy. As a portrait of bureaucratic incompetence, Project Shadowchaser works perfectly. I mean, let’s be honest. If there ever was a cryogenic prison, the wrong people would probably be getting unfrozen all the time. No one’s going to keep track of who is in which pod.