Three Films Make A Post: True love never dies.

The Crow  (2024): What a mess. There’s obviously nothing wrong with re-adapting Jamie O’Barr’s classic goth comic. Even though Alex Proyas’s film is basically perfect, there would certainly be ways to do something new and interesting with the material.

Unfortunately, this was directed by the guy that brought us the live action version of Ghost in the Shell and Snow White and the Huntsman, and is consequently the sort of remake that does make not a single good decision. The characters are insufferable – and cutting out the actual human emotional heart of the proceedings is a ridiculously bad choice –, the music choices often downright bizarre, and Rupert Sanders has no sense of style or flow as a director. I sort of dig Danny Huston chewing the scenery as the film’s Big Bad, but these are low hanging fruit.

Man of War (2026): While I can’t help but feel somewhat uncomfortable with an action movie that takes place in the early stages of the Russian attack on the Ukraine, it is difficult arguing against William Kaufman being the one director working the ever shrinking field of the direct to home viewing action industry whose particular talents are best suited to this sort of thing.

Much-feted – and rightly so - by the handful of people who care for his hyperrealistic approach to modern tactical gun combat scenes, Kaufman is also able to provide enough actual human grounding to the action for it to feel organic and in contact with those parts of the human experience that aren’t violence and/or cowering in fear. The characters are clichés for a movie of this type, but breathing ones, so there are actual emotional stakes here. That the action is pretty fantastic is to be expected of Kaufman anyhow.

Webmaster (1998): You probably won’t find many people who’d call this ultra-cheap looking cyberpunk movie from Denmark of all places an actually good movie, but it certainly is an entertaining one when one is interested in watching cheap cyberpunk movies from Europe (which I obviously am).

Its future consists exclusively of the most primitive computer animation standing in for cyberspace, grotty maintenance corridors, noir tropes and general horniness, filmed in ugly colours and with the most basic blocking.

Thomas Borch Nielsen’s film certainly has a very specific vibe; if you meet it there, it’s actually a fascinating little film of a future made out of discarded bits of the past.

Sinners and Saints (2010)

Post-Katrina New Orleans. Policeman Sean Riley (Johnny Strong) is in about as bad a shape as is his city. His little son died a couple of years ago from an illness, his wife left him, and he’s a husk of a man drawn ever further into cycles of violence. Consequently, we find him straight-up murder the man who just shot his partner (a cameo by good old Kim Coates in one of his few non-gangster stints as an honest cop). Things will go even downhill from here, for Sean soon finds himself invited into a particularly horrible homicide investigation. Detective Will Glanz (Kevin Phillips) is the lucky bastard tasked with solving a series of killings whose victims are set on fire, then doused with a fire extinguisher, then set on fire again, and so on. Sean’s supposed to be his street crime expert.

As luck will have it, Colin (Sean Patrick Flanery), an old army buddy of Sean’s seems to be involved in the whole messy affair, though it’ll take some time to clear up if he’s working for the guy leading the killers (Costas Mandylor), is a direct part of the crimes, or what. What’s clear early on is that Sean’s nearly suicidal violent tendencies – and his efficacy as a killer – might actually be the appropriate tools to solve this particular case.

William Kaufman is one of the good handful of truly great, individual voices doing direct to video action films in the USA during the last fifteen or twenty years. In Kaufman’s films, there are little if any of the writing and acting short cuts you usually find in these affairs, nor are these films that can’t afford to show any actual action.

Sure, the more up-market actors here – among them Tom Berenger, Jürgen Prochnow, Jolene Blalock and the inevitable Method Man – are only on screen in a few scenes in what amounts to cameos but unlike the typical way direct to video action often operates where certain characters are only in a film because the filmmakers have Dolph or Jean-Claude for a shooting day, here these actors are cast in roles that are actually part of the plot; well, the Prochnow character might not have been absolutely necessary, but what the hey. Kaufman – who co-wrote the script with Jay Moses – clearly knows how to construct his action film as something with an actual plot, and while it is certainly one full of clichés, it uses its clichés with the kind of conviction that turns them into something a little more satisfying than you’d expect. There’s also the plain fact that Kaufman in general uses standards character types and tropes with a great degree of intelligence and care, putting the decisive bit more thought into standard character arcs and actually writing characters instead of character types. Why, Sean Riley often feels like a person as much as he does the Cop on the Edge.

Interestingly enough, the film even has some ethical concerns about what the things its main character does so well say about him as a human being, or rather, what parts of his humanity they might destroy. At the same time – which makes rather a lot of sense for an action flick – Sinners and Saints is also very specifically interested in how abhorrent acts of violence may or may not be justified depending on one’s position. It’s certainly a more thoughtful approach than you usual find in direct to video action, and it leads to a film which features certain Cop on the Edge movie standard scenes it can approach from a somewhat different angle.

On the acting side, Johnny Strong isn’t quite as, well, strong as I would have wished for the role. He’s not terribly good at acting out the more nuanced emotional beats, though he’s certainly not phoning things in, nor does he ever feel like robot or inadvertently funny. He’s just not quite there. He’s certainly a fine action performer, though, which goes a long way in this context. Costas Mandylor for his part does some fine scenery chewing (but not too much), a weird accent, and is believable as a guy who does truly horrible things as a matter of course.


Last but not least, the action is pretty terrific, with various violent shoot-outs, as well as a few more acrobatic bits, all staged by Kaufman with a sort of casual surety that really sells them as gritty and exciting.

Daylight’s End (2016)

About three years ago, a (of course mysterious) plague struck the world, turning large parts of the population into rage zombie/vampire things that run around more or less mindlessly screaming, drink blood and dissolve when hit by too much sunlight. Now, we’re in Post-Apocalyptica again, the vampires and mindless raiders bothering the few enclaves of civilized humanity.

Rourke (Johnny Strong), our hero of the day, traumatized by the death of his wife at the start of the plague, is roaming the USA in his car, hunting vampires; he’s apparently good enough at it to have made it from New York to Texas. In the god-forsaken ruins of a small town, Rourke saves a woman named Sam (Chelsea Edmundson) from rape and murder by marauders. Sam is now – after the marauders slaughtered her friends – the sole member of an expedition sent out by a group of survivors lead by ex-policeman Frank (Lance Henriksen) holed up in Dallas. Sam and her friends were tasked with finding a cargo plane for the group large enough to get them all to Baja where there’s supposed to be a survivalist enclave. They did even manage to find a plane before the marauders attacked. She convinces the gruff and grumpy Rourke to get her to Dallas.

Once there, things should be easy enough, and not involve various brave/suicidal last stands to hold back any vampire hordes.

Obviously, William Kaufman’s Daylight’s End is mostly a recombination of various elements of zombie post-apocalypse movies, Mad Max style post-apocalypses, and the kind of action Kaufman and leading man (and composer of the movie’s score) Johnny Strong have teamed up for repeatedly, so originality isn’t really a concern. We all know the character types, we know the plot beats, and we know at least in loose terms how things will turn out for everyone.

In this case, however, that doesn’t mean the resulting film isn’t worth watching. Kaufman does manage to get a surprising amount of spectacle out of a clearly minor budget, the action is staged well, and the film flows surprisingly well even though large parts of it reveal it as a corridor runner, that is to say, a film that largely consists of people running up and down various ugly corridors while shooting and sometimes screaming, which isn’t generally a promise of fun. Indeed, the final third of the film does probably contain ten minutes or so too many of this particular stuff, but for most of the running time, Kaufman make all the running back and forth exciting via the magic of effective staging and editing that does its level best to not get things bogged down. There are a good handful of moments in the film that I found genuinely exciting, but just as importantly, Kaufman avoids any scenes that are boring.

Why, even Rourke’s mandatory trauma, and the scenes of minor – Kaufman’s characters generally have a feel of the sort of hard-bitten professionals Howard Hawks loved so much - in-fighting between the survivors make sense and never overstay their welcome. The script (by Chad Law) tends to underplay the possible melodrama, which makes perfect sense for a group of people who have survived for quite this long – if they’ve not gone insane fighting the zombie vampires, they’re probably too numb by now to have screaming matches for longer than five minutes. Characters are archetypes but drawn in short, sharp strokes and as a whole acted well (or at least well enough). There’s certainly never any of the awkwardness in speech or movement from the living you often encounter in low budget zombie apocalypse films. Plus, it’s nice to see a movie that seems to know Lance Henriksen is a treasure.


While this doesn’t add up to a deeply memorable film, or something new in its sub-genre, Daylight’s End’s general air of craftsmanship certainly makes it worth one’s time.

The Hitlist (2011)

Corporate engineer Alan Campbell (Cole Hauser) has a very bad day: the gangster he has debts with is getting violently impatient; at his job, the promotion he thought was his is going to a guy who may or may not have stolen his ideas (and who most certainly is an asshat of the highest degree); and when he gets home, he finds his wife (Ginny Weirick) sleeping with his best friend. I’m happy he doesn’t have any pets, or that’d have been a dead doggie, too, I suppose.

Obviously, Alan’s next step after that particular day is to find the next bar and get dead drunk. Alas, at the bar he meets a guy calling himself Jonas (Cuba Gooding Jr.). After giving Alan the cold shoulder for a bit, Jonas offers himself up as just the guy to cry to, which is exactly what Alan does while getting even drunker. At one point in the conversation, Jonas starts berating Alan for being a wet blanket but also offering help. Well, a very particular kind of help.

Jonas explains to Alan he’s a professional killer, and because he’s such a nice guy, he’s going to kill the five people Alan wants to see die the most for free. Alan, drunk, stupid, and believing he’s just venting in a particularly original manner, makes the list. Shortly after that, Jonas disappears.

Alan does think nothing of it – you don’t meet professional killers who give freebies randomly in bars after all – until he goes to work the next day and finds out his boss, the first man on his hit list, has been murdered. And Jonas certainly isn’t going to stop there.

While I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the best time for the actor himself, I’ve turned into a bit of a fan of the phase in Cuba Gooding Jr.’s career when he couldn’t find proper Oscar winning actor roles anymore but just kept on working in direct-to-DVD, or so cheap they might as well have been, action films and thrillers. I’m especially fond of these phase because Gooding never seems to approach his work there as if he is doing the films he is in a favour with his presence or as if he is slumming (though he surely is). Instead his performances in these films generally have the dignity of true professionalism, and more often than not, it feels as if Gooding’s contributions push everyone else involve to do better work than they usually do.

The Hitlist’s director William Kaufman doesn’t really need a push. While he has to follow the rules of direct-to-DVD action and so can’t quite ever reach the heights of his fantastic debut feature The Prodigy, at the very least his body of work suggests another dedicated professional in a part of the movie realm that has a few too many guys operating in it who don’t exactly seem to care to make a decent movie as long as they can put the names of Lundgren or Van Damme on a DVD cover, even when these hardly feature in the respective films.

While the budget clearly can’t provide too much actual action in this action movie, the handful of sequences that are there have more than decent stunt work and demonstrate a certain dry flair without Kaufman falling back at whoosh cuts, jump cuts or wildly wavering camera; the stunt crew really doesn’t need this sort of distraction because they, too, are dedicated professionals. The action is generally short and punchy, with a nice climax during which Gooding gets to shoot up a police station, Terminator-style.

Which of course leaves many a minute of running time to fill. That’s the point where quite a few direct-to-DVD action films truly falter, for filling the space between acts of violence seems to overtax quite a few imaginations. The Hit List, fortunately, has an actual plot – even one that makes sense if you are willing to buy into the basic set-up - and while the characters’ psychology isn’t exactly deeply insightful, people here usually have a motivation for what they do, and tend to act in ways that’s appropriate to the situation. Now, this doesn’t exactly sound like a glowing compliment to make for any movie, but in direct-to-DVD action movie land, this demonstrates an uncommon degree of care. It’s also, dare I say it, entertaining to watch, often even thrilling. Additionally, having an actual script doesn’t just give Gooding the opportunity to elegantly underplay (at least for this sort of environment) what could be an annoying scenery chewing maniac but also brings out the best of Cole Hauser. The less semi-famous Hauser, it turns out, is really good at playing our sad sack protagonist, believably going from helpless anger at his life to a very specific kind of courage in the end.

This all adds up to a fine bit of low budget action filmmaking.

The Prodigy (2005)

Warning: there will be spoilers

His boss sends criminal enforcer Truman (Holt Boggs) to find the guy who kidnapped the boss’s favourite nephew. Well, most of the nephew, really, for he left an eye as well as a cryptic scrawled message behind. Some old-fashioned detective work suggests the kidnapper is a professional killer so legendary, he’s basically the bogeyman of the underworld. The killer myth likes to work under the moniker of Claude Rains, as befitting a man who has never been seen (by anyone he didn’t kill). That doesn’t explain what Rains wants with the nephew, though, for there doesn’t seem to be any connection between him Truman’s boss at all.

Indeed, it will turn out that Rains is interested in Truman himself, and that Truman has already met him during a violent incident that ended with a warehouse full of dead people, with the first among the handful of people Truman is close to one of the corpses there.

William Kaufman’s The Prodigy is that very rare thing, a locally produced direct-to-DVD action movie with a brain that completely transcends most of its limitations.

Kaufman has gone on to the (probably) greener pastures of regular direct-to-DVD action by now, and is certainly one of the good directors working in that world of Lundgren “starring” roles which take up ten minutes of running time and Cuba Gooding Jr. earning his rent money like a trouper. The Prodigy, though, isn’t merely a decent film made under difficult circumstances, it is a rather special film. One that unites action movie tropes with modern serial killer plot elements and a bit of post-Tarantino crime film in a way that feels organic and logical, an action film with only a handful of action sequences that still doesn’t contain filler, and just an all-around fine movie that often makes clever use of its production constraints.

Case in point is how the first and the last big action set pieces both take place in the same warehouse. This sort of thing is usually the kiss of death for excitement in an action film but Kaufman explicitly has the first and the last acts of violence in the film mirroring each other, the end logically taking place where things started, and what should look lazy or cheap suddenly feels consequential and meaningful.

Kaufman shows himself particularly adept at realizing genre standards convincingly. The Prodigy certainly isn’t the first film containing a serial killer (which Rains in effect is) wanting to turn his adversary into a mirror image of himself by cutting all his ties to humanity, for example, but the plotting is intricate enough and the characterisations (even that of the killer, a guy we never really meet as a person) so strong, the old hat becomes interesting and riveting again.

The film’s storytelling in general is so strong, the way the film tells its tale can even surprise – and most certainly does excite – the more jaded viewer of cheap genre movies. After nearly thirty years of the the whole mythical serial killer thing I have to admit I am somewhat over the trope, finding myself rolling my eyes at the usual Nietzsche quote (not to be found here, happily) and all that comes with it. Nonetheless, the way the old chestnut flows in Kaufman’s film turned it exciting for me again, suggesting that a careful script containing just the right amount of tiny twists to a formula can still go a long way even with the most tired of ideas.

Holt Boggs’s (who also co-wrote the script) performance as Truman is another point in the film’s favour, keeping the guy sympathetic enough to care about what happens to him but never suggesting that he’s just a misunderstood nice guy who just happens to murder people quite adeptly. There’s clearly something missing in Truman, and finding out how much exactly is part of the point of the film.

Kaufman’s direction is very effective, working as well in tightly edited action scenes as in the detective bits, when we are listening to the gangsters’ urban myths about Rains, or when we watch Truman at home with his girlfriend. Unlike a lot of action directors, Kaufman seems quite at home in scenes where nobody gets killed, treating verbal character interaction with the same care he uses for shoot-outs, instead of treating the talking as shit to just get over with to get back to the killing. Kaufman has a careful eye for the mood of any given scene, and seems to approach them all with a clear idea of their respective meaning in the film as a whole.

And that’s really the best thing about The Prodigy: this is not just an excellent low budget action flick, but an excellent low budget action flick that actually has a story to tell.

One in the Chamber (2012)

Welcome to beautiful Prague (at least in part played by beautiful Romania)! Ray Carver (Cuba Gooding Jr.) uses the city as base for his work as a professional killer. When Ray is not killing people, he's soliloquizing about his sinfulness, reading the bible, and stalking Janice Knowles (Claudia Bassols), the now grown daughter of one of his earlier victims, driven by a mixture of guilt and plain obsession he sells to himself as his wish to protect her from harm.

Right now, Ray's even doing his work in Prague, because he was hired by the resident Suverov crime family to wipe out the heads of the resident Tavanian crime family in one go. Unfortunately, Ray's strict "no innocent bystanders come to harm" policy gets in the way of his job, leaving the Tavanians with a not completely incompetent underboss in charge, and Prague in the grip of a gang war. Understandably, the Suverov's aren't at all happy with Ray's performance, so they fly in the near mythical hitman Aleksey Andreev aka "The Wolf" (Dolph Lundgren). Aleksey is a rather different kind of killer than Ray, clearly not driven by a guilty conscience, proclaiming his generally violently chipper mood by wearing loud Hawaii shirts, and given to a much more direct approach than Ray, though he does share Ray's ideas about killing civilians.

When Ray and his handler (Billy Murray) hear of the new man in town, they decide to change sides and work for the Tavanians now. Not surprisingly, Ray and Aleksey are headed for a collision course, and Janice just might get right in the middle of it.

One of the more peculiar developments in movies in the last few years is surely Cuba Gooding Jr.'s new career as a direct-to-DVD action hero; perhaps even more peculiar is how good Gooding is good at his new career, showing enough physicality to be basically believable as a man of violence, and obviously bringing more acting chops than he'd strictly need for the job, which pushes the scripts of the films he's in into slightly more complex directions than you find in something starring someone who wasn't even a decent enough actor for professional wrestling. That tends to make the characters Gooding plays more sympathetic than is the rule in direct-to-DVD action outside the body of work of Jean Claude Van Damme, too. It applies even to a character as much as a self-pitying fool as Ray is, the kind of guy who loves to moan about the guilt being a professional killer brings with it, yet never does anything about it, like stopping to murder people for money, for example.

Additionally, Gooding actually stars in the films he's supposed to star in, and doesn't go the slightly prolonged cameo route as Jean Claude Van Damme or his partner in this outing, Dolph Lundgren, often do. Consequently, there's much more Cuba than Dolph in One in the Chamber but the film's script handles the situation appropriately. In fact, it would make little sense if the two leads had more scenes together. When Lundgren is on screen, he takes on the violent and crazy yet likeable persona that he fills in many films at this point in his career. He's grown rather good at it by now, and is one of the few actors in action movies who can make the wholesale slaughter of a dozen other people somehow look good-natured. If that's always a good thing, I'm not always sure about.

It is a bit disappointing that One in the Chamber's script doesn't make as much out of the strange juxtaposition of its two main characters as I would have wished, but then, Cuba and Dolph (sounds like a sitcom title if ever I saw one) would need to interact more for it to work, which clearly was right out for the production. I'm also not really happy about the (non-)solution to the plotline between Ray and Janice, or rather, about the much too easy and straightforward way the film ends it, taking what should be emotionally heavy, and not a little creepy, stuff and trying to just wink it away.

On the positive side, there is enough complexity here to keep the very basic gang war plot lively, and what the script lacks in dramatic unity, it makes up for with a love for small and colourful details that don't exactly make the world it takes place in believable but protects it from feeling like the series of clichés it actually is. Which is more than I ask of this kind of film, and more than enough to keep me entertained throughout.

It helps that director William Kaufman aims for filming the kind of action scenes the human eye can actually comprehend, which also just happens to be the kind of action scene I find actually fun to watch. As a visual extra, Kaufman also doesn't dive too deeply into the colourless colour film rabbit hole, leaving my eyes delighted by the existence of other colours than yellow and blue, or, in the case of Lundgren's shirts, nearly blinded by them.

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