The Ghost (2001)

The Ghost (2001)- * * *

Directed by: Douglas Jackson

Starring: Michael Madsen, Julie Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Richard Hatch, Michael Paul Chan, Al Leong, George Cheung, Brad Hunt, Louis Herthum, James Hong, Brad Dourif, and Henry Smalls as Henry

Jing (Lee) is an assassin for the Tongs who is so elusive, she's known as "The Ghost". After she gets on the wrong side of evil baddie Chang (Tagawa), he vows to hunt her down and kill her. She makes that much harder for him by flying from Hong Kong to Los Angeles so she can pose as the Asian mail-order bride to a man named Edward Cosgrove (Hatch). While initially the relationship between the two is just for her cover, she gradually begins to genuinely fall for the good-natured Edward.

Meanwhile, an underling for Chang, Inspector Wu (Chan), and a bunch of his heavies, follow Jing to L.A. But because they don't know where she is, they end up at the doorstep of one Daniel Olinghouse (Madsen), of Olinghouse Bail Bonds. Olinghouse and a Lt. Garland (Dourif) of the LAPD have a working relationship despite some past troubles, and the men are tasked by Chang and Wu to find Jing. 

But it comes at an ever-increasing price. Olinghouse's bail bondsmen Browner (Herthum) and Sink (Hunt) may be masters of disguise, but it's going to take all the ingenuity of Olinghouse to finally track down the crafty Jing. Will anyone finally bust THE GHOST?

Yes, The Ghost is stupid and dumb and all that, but thankfully it's the GOOD kind of stupid and dumb. It's all very enjoyable and entertaining - far more so than you'd think it might be. Of course, there are the standard low-budget pitfalls: a cheap overall look, rough edits, amateurish acting, questionable fight choreography, and the like, but somehow, against all odds, it manages to win you over. You have to love it. It only adds to the viewing experience. 

If you like awkward dialogue delivered awkwardly amidst awkward stagings, The Ghost is the movie for you. It easily could have been another dud like Double Deception (2001), but it manages to sidestep that by having a silly charm all its own.

The solid cast and 85-minute running time also help a lot. First off, we have Julie Lee as The Ghost. Her character does go through an important arc: she starts off as an Asian Minnie Driver, but she ends up as an Asian Anjelica Huston. We really grew to love her flat-as-a-board line readings in her husky (some wags might say "mannish") voice. Especially in her "beating up MAP's (Middle-Aged Punks)" scene, she was reminiscent of Tiana Alexandra going undercover as "Cinderella Pu" in Catch the Heat (1987). She was good in her Martial Arts fight scenes, but it's hard not to be upstaged by Henry Smalls as Henry.

The Ghost, as a film in total, needed more Henry! His character was unquestionably the movie's highlight. Any time he was on screen, we shouted "Yes!" We loved him, and we should have seen more of him. 

Of course, there's plenty of Michael Madsen here for us all to enjoy. He brings his classic charisma, gravelly voice, and fantastic fashion choices to the fore. He's sort of the nucleus of the film and what we see revolves around him. The scenes between Madsen and Brad Dourif showcase an "odd couple" vibe that's fun to watch. Tagawa plays - you guessed it - a bad guy, just as he's done in every role in his career. We'd love to see something where he plays the good guy. But it seems he was typecast just because he looks evil. It's a shame.

On the other end of that spectrum, Richard Hatch plays the innocent guy caught up in all this, not to mention the romantic male lead, and honestly it's probably the best Hatch we've seen to date.

B-Movie mainstays such as Al Leong, George Cheung, and James Hong, among others, round out the cast. The whole outing is amusing and funny. Maybe you have to have a sense of humor to enjoy The Ghost, which it seems not everybody does.

The early 00's were not the best time for movies, so that means that The Ghost is probably the best movie of 2001 by default. For B-Movie DTV denizens such as ourselves, it's well worth seeking out.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

High Voltage (1997)

High Voltage (1997)- * *1\2

Directed by: Isaac Florentine

Starring: Antonio Sabato Jr., Amy Smart, William Zabka, Lochlan Munro, James Lew, George Cheung, Antonio Sabato Sr., Mike Mains, and Shannon Lee

Johnny (Sabato Jr.), Larry (Munro), Molly (Smart), and Sam (Mains) are a bank-robbing gang and they sure do love their guns. Their luck runs out when a particular bank that they rob is a front for the Vietnamese mafia. Now Victor Phan (Cheung) and Harry (Lew), among many other goons, are after them. So is a biker named Bulldog (Zabka). Of course his name is Bulldog. The final showdown occurs at a run-down hotel managed by Carlo (Sabato Sr.) – who will come out on top in this gang war?



In 1998, we were all living in a post-Tarantino, post-John Woo world. Director Isaac Florentine seemingly decided he should try his hand at a mélange of the two directors’ styles, but complete with his own trademark “whoosh” sound effects. Thanks to fight choreographer Koichi Sakamoto and Florentine himself, the fight scenes are well-done and fun to watch. Hence, High Voltage shouldn’t be classified as a Tarantino slog, necessarily, but in the non-action scenes, it gets fairly close.



Yes, there is a lot of inconsequential, post-dubbed dialogue in between the action scenes that viewers probably won’t really care about. But then a, frankly, High Voltage action scene will arrive and things perk up a lot. Thrill’s Antonio Sabato Jr. not only flies sideways while shooting two pistols, he flies frontwards while shooting two pistols as well. There’s plenty of top-notch stuntwork going on and the action setpieces are very enjoyable.



Thankfully, William Zabka screams while shooting a machine gun. The movie overall could have used more Zabka. He sports a very 90’s “grunge” look throughout the film, as it was the 90’s after all (though if memory serves, grunge was fairly well out the window by ’98. That didn’t preclude the inclusion of a song called “Trashgrunge” on the soundtrack, however). 

Also helping things are the presences of fan favorites James Lew, George Cheung, and an uncredited Donald Gibb as a bartender. It was also nice to see Antonio Sabato Sr. join the fray. Interestingly, Amy Smart, as you probably well know, was in Crank: High Voltage (2009). Surely this must mark one of the few, if only, times an actress appeared in an action movie, then, over ten years later, was in another film with the same title (although, granted, it’s a subtitle in the latter case). Still, worthy to point out, I think. 

Featuring a “greatest hits” recap before the credits, not during them as certain Jackie Chan films do, High Voltage has its flaws – pretty much the plot and dialogue department – but makes up for it in the action department. That being said, it was probably one of the best things coming out on video store shelves at the time – the late 90’s/early 2000’s being a notoriously fallow time for quality DTV product. For the action scenes, we say give High Voltage a watch.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

Ultimate Target (2000)

Ultimate Target (2000)- * 

Directed by: Darren Doane

Starring: Gary Daniels, Michael Madsen, David "Shark" Fralick, and George Cheung

Thomas Kane (or is it Cane?) (Daniels) is a hitman. He works on sort of a “board of directors” of other hitmen and hitwomen. These hitpeople are overseen by their boss, a guy named Raymond (Cheung). It’s Raymond’s job to keep people like Uncle (Madsen) and Johnny (Fralick), among others, in line. 

Kane gets out of line when he begins double-dealing: he takes money from his intended victims as payment for sparing their lives. When the organization finds out about this, they get mad and send all their employees after Kane, thus making him the ULTIMATE TARGET. The only problem is, his wife Jody (Denier) and his daughter didn’t know about his profession and now they’re on the run from the baddies. Holing up in yet another dusty ol’ town, Kane prepares to take on the dangerous people he once worked with. But will he be successful?

We hate to be the bearer of bad news. I mean, we really, really do. It pains us to report that, after fifteen years of waiting to see this quasi-unreleased movie, we found that it was a disappointment. We understand that it was plagued with production problems and was swept under the rug, along with a lot of DTV product of that time (and a decent chunk of Michael Madsen’s career), becoming another casualty of the low-budget DTV downturn of the late 90’s/early 2000’s.  It was around this time that the DTV bubble went bust, and items like Ultimate Target make it easy to see why. Not only is it a Tarantino Slog (a term we coined), but, at this point in time, it’s safe to say that it’s also a Guy Ritchie slog. Let’s just say it hasn’t withstood the test of time.

We were truly excited to see one of our favorite actors, Gary Daniels, team up with Michael Madsen. Even the (unnecessary?) narration from Daniels’s character is helped along by his mellifluous voice. This is countered by Madsen’s gravelly voice, which is ALMOST enough to keep the movie afloat, but the only problem is that we hear way too much of their voices. 

In true Tarantino Slog style, this movie is extremely talky. We needed less talk, more rock. Characters gratuitously eat/talk about breakfast cereal, reminding you instantly of Eric Stoltz’s character in Pulp Fiction. There’s a ton of other yak-yak, and when we finally get to see some fight scenes, they are pulled and stretched in varying combos of slow motion and fast motion. As we have stated before, we really hate fast motion. Another thing we hate, bathroom humor, is also, sadly, here. Maybe the characters talked about everything else there is to talk about and finally reached the bathroom. Not good. Another strike. 

On the bright side, Daniels is good in the movie and tries against all odds to make everything work. Even when what surrounds him is weak, Daniels always remains watchable. The pairing with Madsen didn’t live up to its full potential, but Daniels was reunited with his old Deadly Target (1994)/Fistof the North Star (1995)/White Tiger (1996) co-star George Cheung. We have always admired Cheung and his impressive resume. But this whole outing doesn’t FEEL right. Almost like it wasn’t fully completed, which perhaps it wasn’t.  It’s all very similar to the comparable Double Tap (1997). In that particular T-Slog, Stephen Rea is the hitman, and the rest of the cast jabberjaws on about a bunch of needless topics. Please consult that review for a more in-depth analysis of the aforementioned Tarantino Slog.

In the end, Ultimate Target (AKA Ides of March, not to be confused with the Ryan Gosling movie of the same name, though it would have been cool to see Gary Daniels in Gosling’s role) proves definitively that characters walking in slow motion either with or without sunglasses is not enough to make a complete film. 2000 was just about he moment when the shorthand replaced the substance. Much like Hostile Intent’s beloved Pastebucket McWoo, the last thing we as viewers see, if you stick it out all the way to the END of the end credits, is this, and we quote: “2001 Giants Entertinment”. Yes, that’s right. They misspelled “Entertainment”. And doesn’t that say it all, really?

Comuppance Review by: Brett and Ty 

The Silent Force (2001)

The Silent Force (2001)- * 

Directed by: David May

Starring: Loren Avedon, Karen Kim, George Cheung, and Matthias Hues










Frank Stevens (Avedon) is a U.S. Federal Agent who commands a special ops team known as “The Silent Force”. They’ve come across their toughest assignment yet when they face off against some evil Asian mobsters headed by Pao (Cheung). After the Pao gang kills off a bunch of Silent Force members, Stevens gets mad and goes after them, and all-out war ensues. 

Also Stevens tries to save the widow of one of his former buddies, Natalie Woo (Karen Kim). Will the Silent Force be SILENT...aaah, We just can’t come up with a silly pun this time. This movie is just too stupid. It’s not worth it...

Unfortunately, The Silent Force is pretty darn bad. It gives us no pleasure to deliver a negative review, but this movie, sadly, has very little going for it. It’s very poorly and uncreatively written, the editing is abrupt and choppy, it was the late 90’s/early 2000’s, so many scenes are underlit and hard to see, there’s plenty of student-film-style ADR work, and the whole thing is not well-structured and seems very amateurish, not in a good way. 

Of course, there’s a lot of terrible acting, but that never bothered us too much in these low budget productions. But you add it all together...and meant to HOLD it all together is Avedon, a man who is not likable and seems to be striving against all available evidence to try very hard to be cool, and this is a surefire recipe for unmitigated disaster. The whole thing has a junky feel and it simply doesn’t work.

Thankfully, this is the only known credit for “writer”/ “director” David May. Perhaps he saw this botched movie as nothing more than a stumble along the road of his life, and decided to get into another line of work. Good for him. Back in the golden era of the video store, this turkey would have been known as shelf-filler. But by its release date of 2001 (it looks like it was shot a few years earlier) those shelves where disappearing fast, and cheapo DVDs were ending up at gas stations, thus giving The Silent Force the ignominious distinction of being gas-station filler. And it’s not even useful for your life, like, say, gasoline, antifreeze, or those little tree car air fresheners.

It does have some classic cliches: the BYC (Black Yelling Chief), some very dumb one-liners, and the prerequisite torture (though in this case it’s pointless torture that goes on way too long - like everything else in the movie, they screwed it up and there’s no sense of  pacing). And not only is Avedon trying really hard to be cool, he looks like any number of different people, depending on the scene he’s in. In various scenes he resembles:

    - Tom Cruise
    - Gabriel Byrne
    - Eric Roberts
    - Griffin Dunne
    - Jeff Speakman
    - Kyle MacLachlan.

Just an observation. Avedon needs screen presence that doesn’t recall any other famous faces. In one of his more Tom Cruise-esque scenes, a song plays on the soundtrack that is a blatant knockoff of “Danger Zone”, presumably to drive the point home. He really wants you to think of him as 1986-era Mapother. In some scenes it sounds like Avedon is reading his dialogue off paper in a studio somewhere else. Elsewhere, he seems to be taking this regrettable outing way TOO seriously. There’s no balance with this guy. 

A glimmer of hope arrives (way too late) when, towards the end of the movie, Matthias Hues shows up. He begins beating up Avedon and our attention perked up, as we thought it might have a saving grace. We weren’t expecting a No Retreat, No Surrender 2 (1987) situation, but their fight was too short and extremely disappointing. It all leads to those same familiar questions: Who watched/enjoyed this? Did the filmmakers think this was good, or did they know it sucks?

As we all know, by 2001 the golden age of DTV was over, and if you needed any more proof of that fact, here it is. The Silent Force is an insultingly dumb slog to sit through, so make sure you avoid it.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

White Tiger (1996)

White Tiger (1996)-* * *

Directed by: Richard Martin

Starring: Gary Daniels, Cary-Hiroyugi Tagawa, Matt Craven, Julia Nickson,and George Cheung


“Change is the only constant in life."







DEA agent Mike Ryan (Daniels) would rather be rock climbing with his buddy and fellow Special Op John Grogan (Craven)...but instead he’s chasing after a gang of Asian drug lords led by the sinister Victor Chow (Tagawa). Like Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991), Tagawa and his boys are going to unleash a powerful new drug on the black market. When Chow murders his buddy, despite being told to just “let it go”, Mike Ryan goes out for revenge - but who can he trust? The beautiful Jade (Nickson)? The beautiful Detective Fong (Cheung)? Mike Ryan is going to have to go rogue and trust his own instincts and martial arts skill on his quest to find Victor Chow.

Gary Daniels plays another likable dude and Tagawa another baddie in White Tiger, a film with not much going on in the plot department, but which contains great fights and is very fast paced.  The story is credited to Bey Logan, the mastermind of the excellent Dragon Dynasty label of releases. So you know there’s going to be quality fights and stunts. Funnily enough, the music that underpins it all is either this modern techno or 90’s “grunge”. While the movie does take place primarily in Seattle (although it was filmed in Vancouver, Canada), the band “Pull” should be ashamed. Graeme Coleman who did the electronic soundtrack was trying to bring the martial arts film into the 90’s, but we feel he over-reached a bit.

But the overall feel is that the filmmakers were trying to modernize the direct-to-video action film, with the aforementioned music, slick cinematography and a professionally-made vibe. Luckily, they didn’t use these things as substitutes for the action goods, as is so common today. Gary Daniels always rocks and here is no exception. In his non-action scenes, he is his usual personable, charming self, and in the action department, he seems to be constantly pushing himself and trying new things. Check out some of his awesome takedowns for proof. While Tagawa and some of the others are good, White Tiger is a clear case of No Daniels = No Movie. He carries the film and makes it seem effortless.

For an intellectually unchallenging but classier-than-usual DTV beat ‘em up, White Tiger will fit the bill perfectly.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty