Space Wars: Quest for the Deep Star

Of course, the original Star Wars films were far more fun than the recent stuff from Disney. The knock-offs were also better back then. It is always hard to stop watching the Roger Corman-produced “homages” like Battle Beyond the Stars and Space Raiders (with its suspiciously similar looking special effects). At its best moments, this movie is a little like those scruffy space operas, but only just a little. Still, a lot of stuff gets blasted in Garo Setian’s Space Wars: Quest for the Deep Star, which releases Tuesday on DVD.

In this far, far away galaxy, a dead person’s essence, their consciousness and soul, can be bottled up and reconstituted in an android, but only if you have enough money. Kip Corman (a hat-tip to the B-movie king?) did not have enough money to finish the job for his late (at least for now) wife. To pay for her android transfer, he and his daughter Taylor have taken on several dubious salvage jobs, earning the antagonism of the evil galactic dictator Elnora in the process.

The mother of all salvage jobs would be the Deep Star, a legendary space wreck lost somewhere in the universe. Corman was not even looking for it, when he and Taylor save Jackie, a quirky star-cartographer (who has probably been living alone in space too long), from the outlaw Dykstra, who wants her to chart his course to the Deep Star. Unfortunately, he captures Taylor, in return.

Frankly, the special effects were probably better in Roger Corman’s aforementioned movies (seriously, would he have re-used lackluster space battles?). However, there is something weirdly endearing about its eager over-ambitions. VOD mainstay Michael Pare plays it straight as Corman, never winking for the camera. Olivier Gruner makes an unusually tough villain as Dystra, but he must have been slightly embarrassed by the fight choreography, which mostly consists of everyone exchanging round house punches, like drunken cowboys. Plus, Anahit Setian is surprisingly endearing as the less-shticky-than-you-might-expect Jackie.

Mark Dacascos’s Showdown in Manila

Maybe Trump shouldn’t have asked for so many encores from Duterte, the Mindinaoan Fog. Ordinarily, you would think when an American FBI agent is gunned down on the beach of the Philippines’ most exclusive tourist hotels, the cops would be slightly keyed up to catch the killers. Unfortunately, his widow will have to retain the services of an unlikely private investigator, Russian Nick Peyton, a former Manila copper and his American sex addict partner, Charlie Benz, in Mark Dacascos’s Showdown in Manila (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in Los Angeles.

How did a Russian stiff like Peyton get on the Manila force in the first place? Apparently, it was his fast-and-loose approach to due process and that kind of stuff. These days, he mainly works divorce cases and his partner Benz causes them. Mark Wells’ new widow is a bit frustrated with the local cops. Everyone knows he was gunned down by the notorious drug lord Aldric Cole and his men. She can even whip up a portrait of him, since she is a former police sketch artist.

The problem isn’t identifying Cole, it’s finding him. Fortunately, Peyton will be able to track him down by laying a beating on several of his known associates. While they are at it, Peyton and Cole will also rescue Kiki, a lapsed recovering teen addict they both seem to take a creepy fatherly interest in.

Thank Heavens, Cynthia Rothrock, Don “The Dragon” Lee, and Olivier Gruner all show up to save the film’s bacon when it is time to launch an assault on Cole’s jungle hideout-meth lab. They are also old colleagues from the Manila SWAT team, or whatever. In any case, when they are shooting the living the snot out of Cole’s men, Showdown is pure 1980s gold.

Unfortunately, it takes about an hour to get to that point. Still, Alexander Nevsky (the actor, not the Thirteenth Century Russian Prince) and Casper Van Dien are tolerably chummy as Peyton and Benz. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Matthias Hues chew plenty of scenery as Cole and his chief henchman, Dorn. Philippine teen idol Hazel Faith Dela Cruz has some screen presence, but as Kiki, she looks totally out of place in this ostensibly gritty story. Of course, Rothrock, Lee, and Gruner do their thing as Haines, Dillon, and Ford, basically the cavalry. However, Dacascos kills himself off too early as Wells, because he definitely still has the moves. As a bonus, that really is Tia Carrere as Mrs. Wells.

Dacascos helms the big action scenes with the sort of lucid professionalism fans prefer. We’ll take the clarity of Isaac Florentine over the shaky-cam of Paul Greenglass every time. Everybody seems to enjoy the big smack down with Rothrock and company, like a sort of mini-b-movie Expendables featurette, for good reason. Indeed, a little less talking, a little less Nevsky, a little more action, and a little more Dacascos and this film would have really been getting somewhere. Worth catching on VOD as a nostalgia trip, Showdown in Manila opens tomorrow (1/19) in LA, at the Laemmle Music Hall.