Tag Archives: Shannon Tweed

Cinemax Friday: Hard Vice (1994, directed by Joey Travolta)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Who doesn’t love some Hard Vice?

Someone’s killing businessman in Las Vegas and it’s up to the vice squad to figure out who.  Captain Bronski (James Gammon) knows that his cops are going to need some help so he brings in a detective named Joe (Sam J. Jones).  Joe is a tough-talking, hard-drinking modern day cowboy who even owns a hat.  He doesn’t think that women should be investigating major crimes and that brings him into conflict with his new partners, especially Andrea (Shannon Tweed).

Despite not being happy about having to work together, Joe and Andrea put aside their differences long enough to investigate the murders and fall in love.  They discover that all of the men used the same escort service.  Could the murderer be a pimp named Tony (Branscombe Richmond, who played Bobby Sixkiller on Renegade) or could it be a renegade prostitute (played by Rebecca FerattI) who is called Christy in the movie but who is listed as being named Allison in the end credits?  Or could it be someone closer to the vice squad?

Hard Vice is a typical late night Cinemax crime movie, heavy on the neon and the synthesized music but light on unexpected plot twists.  There are still a few things about the movie that set it apart from other movies of the era.  First off, this movie features a man armed only with a handgun managing to blow up a helicopter.  Secondly, even though the film is set in the 90s, the vice squad is stuck using bulky computers from the 80s and the scene where they use the computer to look up information on the victims has to be seen to be believed.  Finally, any movie that brings Shannon Tweed and Rebecca Feratti together is worthy of a little appreciation.  Toss in Sam J. Jones and James Gammon sounding like he’s been smoking six packs of cigarettes a day and you’ve got a film that’s almost worth watching.

Hard Vice was directed by Joey Travolta, who is best known for being John’s younger brother.  This was the first film he ever directed and, checking with the imdb, I was surprised to discover that he’s directed a lot more since.  Joey’s direction in Hard Vice isn’t that bad, though Las Vegas is one of those cities where it’s probably impossible not to come up with an interesting shot or two if you’re filming there.  Travolta tosses in a few flash forwards to make sure that we know we’re watching a real film and not just your run-of-the-mill neo-noir.  They don’t add much to the plot but when you’re trying to establish your auteur credentials, I guess you do what you have to do.

Cinemax Friday: Forbidden Sins (1999, directed by Robert Angelo)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

There’s been a murder!  A stripper named Virginia Hill (Kristen Pierce) has been found dead and the evidence suggests that she died as the result of sadomasochistic sex play gone wrong.  Lead detective John Doherty (Myles O’Brien) immediately suspects that the murderer is David Mulholland (Corin Timbrook).  Mulholland is a millionaire who owns the club where Virginia used to dance.  He has a reputation for being into some kinky stuff.  (A cashier at the local adult bookstore swears that Mulholland only buys BDSM-related magazines.)  Detective Doherty is convinced that Mulholland not only killed Virginia but that he’s killed before.  For this detective, this case is personal.

It’s about to get a lot more personal because, after he’s arrested, Mulholland hires Maureen Doherty (Shannon Tweed) to defend him in court.  Maureen is John’s ex-wife and she knows firsthand how obsessive her former husband is.  For reasons that she can’t fully explain, Maureen feels that Mulholland has been set up.  Working with Virginia’s best friend, Molly Malone (Amy Lindsay), Maureen sets out to prove that Mulholland is innocent.  But is he?

Yes, it’s yet another remake of Jagged Edge, with Shannon Tweed more than capably stepping into the Glenn Close role.  The chance to see Shannon Tweed play a high-powered attorney is the main reason to see Forbidden Sins and she does a pretty good job with the role.  Among the stars of the Skinemax era, Tweed was one of the more talented and she was always as credible delivering dialogue as she was disrobing.  Other than Tweed, the rest of the cast is okay but nothing special.  For instance, one reason why Jagged Edge worked was because Jeff Bridges kept you guessing.  In this film, the same cannot be said of Corin Timbrook.  The script and the direction are all pretty much standard for what you would expect from a 90s direct-to-video sexploitation flick and, again, the main thing that elevates this film above others of its type is the conviction that Shannon Tweed brings to her role.

For those who are only watching this film for the nudity (and, to be honest, that’s probably going to be the majority of the people who go to the trouble to track down something called Forbidden Sins), Shannon Tweed has one scene while Amy Lindsay has several.

My favorite thing about Forbidden Sins is that the murdered stripper was named after Bugsy Siegel’s girlfriend.  My second favorite thing about Forbidden Sins is that the working title was apparently Forbidden By Law.  That’s one way to describe murder, I guess.

Cinemax Friday: Night Fire (1994, directed by Mike Sedan)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Night Fire is yet another 90s neo-noir starring Shannon Tweed.

In this one, Tweed plays Lydia.  Lydia is a work-obsessed millionaire who is unhappily married to Barry (John Laughlin).  Lydia and Barry’s sex life has come to a halt.  Lydia wants romance.  Barry wants to tie her up in bed and run a knife over her body.  Even though they have retreated to an isolated ranch house to try to fix their marriage, Lydia simply cannot bring herself to leave her work behind.

One day, while Barry is attempting to drown Lydia in the hot top, two drifters suddenly show up and claim that they’re having car trouble.  Cal (Martin Hewitt) and Gwen (Rochelle Swanson) are wild and uninhibited and everything that Lydia is not.  Lydia is uncomfortable with the idea of them staying at the house while Barry just wants to watch the two of them have sex.  Eventually, the expected mate swapping does occur but there’s a twist.  Barry hired Cal and Gwen to show up at the ranch and help him turn on his wife.  But it turns out that Barry has another, more sinister motive for wanting Cal and Gwen to spend the weekend.

Night Fire is typical of the type of films that used to show up on late night Cinemax.  The plot is mostly just an excuse to get everyone naked and most viewers will be able to see the big twist coming from a mile away.  From the very first scene, it’s obvious that Barry is not to be trusted.

On the plus side, Night Fire features one of Shannon Tweed’s best performances.  Tweed, who has always been a better actress than most critics give her credit for being, gives a smart and believable performance as Lydia.  The script often forces Lydia to do things that fly in the face of logic and it seems to take her forever to figure out that there’s something strange going on.  Lydia would probably seem unbearably daft if she wasn’t played by Shannon Tweed, who is capable of keeping the audience on her side even when she’s playing a role that, on paper, shouldn’t make any sense.  Tweed is smart enough not to play Lydia as being frigid but instead as someone who is just frustrated that her immature husband has invited two complete strangers to spend the weekend with them.  Rochelle Swanson and Martin Hewitt are impressive as the two drifters while John Laughlin is sabotaged by dialogue that reveals him to be untrustworthy from the first minute that he shows up.

Night Fire may not be perfect but it should keep fans of 90s-era Shannon Tweed happy.

 

 

Cinemax Friday: Dead By Dawn (1998, directed by James Salisbury)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Tim Marsh (Bill Ferrell) makes a lot of money and is married to the sexy and beautiful Wendy (Shannon Tweed) but he still thinks of himself as being a loser.  He’d much rather have the life of his old high school buddy, Don White (Ted Prior).  Don is a former baseball player who is opening his own car dealership and is married to a much younger woman named Kim (Jodie Fisher).

One day, Don lets Tim drive his BMW, which Don brags was a gift from Ed McMahon.  Tim loves the car and, while driving it, feels more alive than he has in years.  Don then offers to allow Tim to sleep with his wife.  Tim says that there’s no way that he would ever cheat on Wendy but Don insists.  Eventually, after a party to celebrate Don’s new business, Tim takes Don up on his offer.  The next morning, after Tim has returned home to Wendy, someone murders Kim in her sleep.

Guess who the police suspect?

Dead By Dawn is typical of the low-budget, erotic thrillers that used to dominate late night Cinemax.  Most of these films had plots that could best be described as neo-noir and Dead By Dawn is no different.  Not much happens in Dead By Dawn.  Since there are only four main characters and one of them dies about an hour into the movie, it’s pretty easy to figure out who is double crossing who.  The main problem with the film is that it asks us to believe that Tim would cheat on Shannon Tweed instead of getting down on his knees every day and thanking God that a loser like him managed to marry … well, Shannon Tweed.

Not surprisingly, Shannon Tweed gives the film’s best performance.  Because of her background as a Playboy playmate and her relationships with Hugh Hefner and Gene Simmons, it’s often overlooked that Shannon Tweed was a fairly good actress who had the ability to be both sexy and believable.  She had a down-to-Earth quality to her that was lacking in most of the other direct-to-video vixens of the 90s.  She was the sex symbol who you could imagine running into at the grocery store.

When compared to some of the other films that we all remember from late night Cinemax, Dead By Dawn is fairly tame but aficionados of Shannon Tweed’s film career should enjoy it.

A Movie A Day #289: Night Visitor (1989, directed by Rupert Hitzig)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Billy Colton (Derek Rydall) is a teenager who has a reputation for exaggeration.  Lisa Grace (Shannon Tweed) is his next door neighbor, a high-priced prostitute who does not mind if Billy spies on her.  When Billy tries to tell everyone about his wild new neighbor, no one believes him.  Billy decides to prove his story by grabbing his camera and sneaking next door.  Instead of getting proof that she’s a prostitute, Billy witnesses his neighbor being murdered by a robed Satanist, who just happens to be Zachary Willard (Allen Garfield), Billy’s hated science teacher!  Billy goes to the police with his camera but Captain Crane (Richard Roundtree) points out that Billy forgot to take off the lens cap.

What can Billy do?  He knows that Zachary and his strange brother, Stanley (Michael J. Pollard), are sacrificing prostitutes to Satan but he can’t get anyone to believe him.  Working with his best friend (Teresa Van der Woude) and a burned out ex-cop (Elliott Gould), Billy sets out to stop the Willard Brothers.

Combine Rear Window with late 80s Satanic conspiracy theories and this is the result.  Not as bad as it sounds, Night Visitor is an unfairly obscure movie about Satanism in suburbia. While it has its share of dumb moments (like when Billy uses a watermelon to end a car chase), it also has enough good moments that suggest that Night Visitor is deliberately satirizing the excesses of the Satanic panic that, at the time of filming, was sweeping across the nation.  It also has a once in a lifetime cast.  Along with those already mentioned, keep an eye out for character actor extraordinaire Henry Gibson and future adult film star Teri Weigel.  Allen Garfield is especially good as the evil Mr. Willard.  Any actor can say, “I sacrifice you in the name of Satan.”  It takes a good actor like Allen Garfield to say it without making anyone laugh.

One final note: this movie was originally called Never Cry Devil, which is a much better title than Night Visitor.

A Movie A Day #266: Possessed by the Night (1994, directed by Fred Olen Ray)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Howard Hansen (Ted Prior) is a best-selling horror writer who is suffering from writer’s block.  With his agent, Murray (Frank Sivero), pressuring him to get something written, Howard decides to seek inspiration in Chinatown.  When he steps into a curio shop and sees a grotesque, one-eyed blob floating in a jar of formaldehyde, Howard buys it.  He hopes that the blob will give him an idea for a great book but instead, it just causes him to have nightmares and violent sex with his wife, Peggy (Sandahl Bergman).

Meanwhile, Murray is in debt with loan shark Scott Lindsey (Henry Silva) and Scott’s number one debt collector, Gus (Chad McQueen).  Murray needs money and he needs it quickly.  Murray sends his “secretary,” Carol (Shannon Tweed), to live with the Hansens and steal an unpublished romance novel that Howard wrote when he was just starting out as a writer.  However, the one-eyed blob possesses Carol and she is soon climbing onto both Howard’s workout equipment and Howard!  Soon everyone is under the influence of the one-eyed blob, Carol is forcing Howard and Peggy to make love while she holds the gun on them, and both Gus and Murray are sneaking around the house, trying to find the manuscript.

A movie that was once very popular on late night Cinemax, Possessed By The Night is a sometimes awkward but frequently entertaining horror/thriller hybrid from B-auteur Fred Olen Ray.  Along with giving Frank Sivero a rare leading role (Sivero is best known for playing Frankie in Goodfellas and providing the inspiration for the Simpsons character of the same name), Possessed By The Night proves that no movie can be that bad when featuring both Sandahl Bergman and Shannon Tweed.  When you watch a Fred Olen Ray/Shannon Tweed collaboration from 1994, you know what you’re getting and Possessed By The Night delivers.

A Movie A Day #221: Scorned (1994, directed by Andrew Stevens)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“In an hour, I promise, you’ll be able to beg in two languages.” — Patricia (Shannon Tweed) in Scorned

If anyone could pull that line off, it would be Shannon Tweed at the height of her Skinemax stardom!

In Scorned, Shannon plays Patricia, the beautiful wife of executive Truman Langley (Daniel McVicar).  Truman is desperate to land the Wainwright account, thinking it could be the key to getting a huge promotion.  To help him out, Patricia sleeps with Mason Wainwright (Stephen Young).  Truman gets the account but Alex Weston (Andrew Stevens, who also directed) gets the promotion.  After Truman kills himself, Patricia shows up at the Weston house, disguised as a tutor for their son, Robey (Michael D. Arenz).  Like clockwork, Patricia seduces not just Alex and Robey but Marina Weston (Kim Morgan Greene) as well.

Of the many direct-to-video films that Andrew Stevens and Shannon Tweed made together in the 90s, Scorned is one of the best.  Of course, Shannon Tweed looks good.  Of all the regular 90s direct-to-video vixens, Shannon was the sexiest.  What is often forgotten is that Shannon could also actually act and she shows that here with her ferocious performance.  Andrew Stevens does a good job too, giving an above average performance and, as a director, staying out of Shannon’s way.  He knows that everyone watching the movie is watching to see Shannon and this film does not disappoint.

It does stretch credibility that no one in the household realizes that Shannon is trying to destroy them but, then again, what parents would actually hire their hormonal, teenage son a live-in tutor who looks like this?

It is all about maintaining a healthy suspension of disbelief.

 

A Movie A Day #49: Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure (1995, directed by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

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After five years of kinky sex and murder, the Body Chemistry franchise ended with Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure.

Like the third film, Full Exposure was directed by Jim Wynorski and produced by Andrew Stevens.  Shannon Tweed stepped into the role of murderous Dr. Claire Archer, replacing Shari Shattuck.  Shannon Tweed was always one of the most talented of the actresses who regularly appeared on what was then nicknamed Skinemax.  It wasn’t just that Tweed always seemed to being give it her all in her films’ frequent sex scenes.  Tweed also had the look and style of an old-fashioned femme fatale.  It was easy to imagine her trading sultry quips with Alan Ladd or Tom Neal.  This made Tweed perfect for the role of Claire Archer and her performance was a noticeable improvement on Shari Shattuck’s.  It’s just too bad the rest of the film was such a snoozefest.

In Full Exposure, after getting away with three murders in the first two Body Chemistry films, Claire has finally been arrested.  She is on trial for killing Alan Clay (Andrew Stevens) at the end of the third film.  However, she has a hotshot lawyer named Simon Mitchell (Larry Poindexter) and she is soon up to her old tricks, having sex with Simon in his office, a parking garage, and an elevator.  Simon’s aide, Lane (Marta Martin), has come across proof of Claire’s crimes but Claire has a plan to take care of that.  She always does.

Full Exposure starts out as a typical Body Chemistry film, with neon-lit sex scenes, but it quickly get bogged down in lengthy courtroom sequences.  In the previous three films, Claire at least had some sort of motivation but here, it’s never clear why she would try to destroy her lawyer’s life during the trial instead of waiting until he had, at least, gotten her off the hook.  Tweed is a perfect Claire but the rest of the cast is just going through the motions.   Though Claire once again got away with murder, there were no more chapters to her story after this one.  The Body Chemistry franchise managed to do a lot with a very thin premise but Full Exposure shows, that by the fourth film, there was no where left to go.

A Movie A Day #41: No Contest (1995, directed by Paul Lynch)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

8348-no-contest-0-230-0-345-cropUnder the direction of their leaders, Oz (Andrew “Dice” Cay) and his second-in-command, Ice (Roddy Piper), a diverse group of terrorists have taken the Miss Galaxy contest hostage.  If they don’t receive a ransom of diamonds, they will kill the Miss Galaxy contestants, including the daughter of a powerful senator.  What the terrorists didn’t count on was that the show would be hosted by actress and kick boxer Sharon Bell (Shannon Tweed).  Now, it’s up to Sharon to sneak through a locked-down hotel, killing the terrorists one-by-one.  Her only help comes from a battle-scarred but supportive security officer (Robert Davi) locked outside of the hotel.

No Contest is so much of a rip-off of Die Hard that it almost qualifies as a remake.  (It is probably not a coincidence that Robert Davi appears in both movies.)  Despite being such a blatant rip-off, No Contest is redeemed by the combination of Andrew “Dice” Clay’s Broolyn-accented villainy and a surprisingly convincing performance from Shannon Tweed.  Toss in Roddy Piper and Robert Davi and the end result is one entertaining direct-to-video thriller.

Shannon Tweed’s best film?  No contest.  It’s No Contest.

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A Movie A Day #40: In the Cold of the Night (1990, directed by Nico Mastorakis)

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51zd7jstaol-_sy445_Scott Bruin (Jeff Lester) is a high fashion photographer who is haunted by nightmares in which he strangles a naked woman in the swimming pool.  His nymphomaniac girlfriend, Lena (Shannon Tweed!), is surprisingly understanding when she wakes up to discover Scott strangling her but Scott is worried that he might be losing his mind.  His psychiatrist (David Soul) is not much help.  When Scott has a violent vision in the middle of photo shoot, he freaks out.  “Hey, are you on drugs?” one of the models asks.

Then Scott meets Kimberly (Adrienne Sachs) and she looks exactly like the woman from his dreams.  When she invites him to back to her house, the house looks exactly like the house from his nightmares.  Is Scott going crazy or is he seeing the future?  And how is Kimberly’s ex, a cold businessman named Ken Strom (Marc Singer), involved?

Does anyone remember this movie?  In the 90s, this used to be on HBO and Cinemax all of the time.  It’s a typical sex-fueled, nudity-filled direct-to-video thriller but Nico Mastorakis, a Greek director who has obviously learned a lot from Brian DePalma, gives the movie an enjoyably slick sheen.  Neither Jeff Lester nor Adrienne Sachs gives a good performance and the plot feels like it was made up on the spot but fans of Shannon Tweed in her Skinemax heyday might enjoy it.

In the Cold of the Night also features Tippi Hedren, playing Kimberly’s mother.  She only appears in one scene and freaks out when she sees some birds.  The scene ends with Adrienne Sachs looking directly at the camera and saying, “Mother simply hates birds!”