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Paul Thomas Anderson directed this very loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel "Oil!" and set out to make a epic masterpiece for the ages, using Kubrickian cinematography with the epic performance of Daniel Day Lewis and a foreboding chilling score of screeching violins. Critics and film snobs hailed "There Will Be Blood" as the best movie of the first decade of the Millennium. Praise was given for "There Will Be Blood"'s subversive content, multiple levels of meaning, and in-depth character study of an amoral psychopath.

The first twenty minutes or so open with long slow, plodding panning by the camera over the Texas desert. That glacial pace establishes the tone for the rest of the movie, with interminable amounts of time where nothing happens. The central character is a cold-hearted bastard named Daniel Plainview played by Daniel Day Lewis, in a rehash of his cold-hearted bastard turn in "Gangs of New York", only more evil. Plainview steps over anyone and anything to make a buck in the oil industry: using an orphan as a prop to gain sympathy, cheating honest people out of their land, pretending to find God so he can build an oil pipeline(?) and killing people along the way. The foreboding score establishes mood as if something epic is going to happen in the final reel.

Unfortunately nothing really does. After seeing three decades or so of Plainview's life he begins as an evil despicable man, becomes an evil despicable man, and ends as an evil despicable man. Instead of the grand finale that the audience interminably waits for, the final scene comes out of nowhere with a preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) that Plainview hates coming to Plainview to beg for money(also out of nowhere). Plainview yells about milkshakes, bludgeons Sunday to death with a bowling pin, then tells the butler "I'm finished." The End.

Raoul Walsh told the same story of an amoral psychopath with the gangster drama "White Heat" way back in 1949. Watch the final scene of White Heat where the great, great James Cagney as Cody Jarret stands on steel grating atop a chemical plant,laughing maniacally as bullets whiz by and fuel tanks blaze, yelling "Made it Ma! Top of the World!" just before the whole thing explodes in a giant inferno. There's an ending. And Walsh managed to do it with 42 less minutes than Paul Thomas Anderson does with "There Will Be Blood".

Whenever the guy typing this review mentions "White Heat" to fans of "There Will Be Blood" it is inevitable that they haven't seen it. Instead of Hollywood classics from the Golden Age, they prefer the too-cool-for-everything worldview of "There Will Be Blood" with its lack of storyline, laborious pacing, bleakness, nihilism and cheap potshots at the Christian faith. Perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson has personally adopted this schadenfreude worldview as he sadistically forces the viewer to realize they have wasted 2 hours and 38 minutes of their precious lifetime that cannot be given back.

Tyler Perry's directorial movie debut was the second adaptation of his stage plays to make it to the big screen. Initially released in 2002 as a filmed version of the stage play, "Madea's Family Reunion" has its roots in the gospel musical; melodramatic morality plays with titles like "Your Arms Are Too Short To Box With God", several plot lines, lots of speechifying, and plenty of shouted comments from audiences of middle-aged evangelical Black women in brightly colored hats.

The big screen adapation is a follow-up to Perry's first screenplay "Diary of a Mad Black Woman". Perry reprises his role as Madea (aka Mabel Simmons), a big-bosomed take-no-crap-but-ultimately-kind-hearted grandmother/aunt/anchor of an extended Black family in Atlanta whose house serves as a kind of refuge for troubled young female relatives. He also plays Madea's lecherous pot-smoking brother Joe and lawyer Brian who constantly gets Madea out of legal trouble brought about by her Samaritan actions. This time around Madea takes in unwed mother of two Vanessa (Lisa Arrindell Anderson) and rebellious foster child Nikki (Keke Palmer). The drama gets compounded when Vanessa's sister Lisa (Rochelle Aytes) shows up, fleeing from her abusive fiancé played by Blair Underwood. Nikki is disciplined and cared for by Madea, Vanessa ends up falling in love against her will with a perfect puppydog-eyed deep-voiced selfless man named Frankie (Boris Kojoe), and Lisa struggles to leave her fiancé against the will of her mother played by Lynn Whitfield.

Perry's first attempt at movie direction is pretty straightforward and fairly competent. There are bright spots. Lynn Whitfield is excellent as the cruel mother, the scenes with Madea are funny, and Underwood is good in what must be his third go-around as the guy who doesn't get the girl. The poetry reading in the jazz cafe is really atmospheric. and the poetry read by Maya Angelou is very uplifting.

Where "Reunion" falters is in the clichés. When Underwood slaps Rochelle Aytes the audience can actually count from five to one the split second it happens. Some of the romantic dialogue spoken by Kojoe is cringeworthy. Comedy bits with Madea move jarringly to over-the-top melodrama involving battered women, child abuse, and incest. Tyler Perry plays Joe in a painfully unfunny flatulence humor monologue that apparently attempts to mimic the family dinner scene played by Eddie Murphy in "The Nutty Professor". The old men leering at the young girls at the family reunion(!) is disturbing. Cicely Tyson's impromptu sermon about the decline of morals in the Black community in the middle of a barbecue(?) may work on stage to an audience that is expecting to be preached at, but on the big screen in a multiplex it's a bit much. The set where the final wedding scene takes place features a church draped in blinding white lace and curtains with real human beings dressed like angels suspended from the ceiling; in such bad taste it's ALMOST funny, but not.

None of this matters, of course, to the God-fearing over-30 Black women Tyler Perry aims his plays and movies at. They flocked to theatres to make "Madea's Family Reunion" the number one movie at the box office its opening weekend. No one else is making movies for them, and as long as Tyler Perry does he's going to continue to laugh all the way to the bank.

The mid-to-late 1980s marked the heyday of the Mom-and-Pop video store. Americans had brought VCRs in record numbers and the "4 Titles For the Price 3" special was the standard way we rented VHS cassettes for the weekend. It took a year or more for top Hollywood movies to come to video (the "A" titles) and to fill up that four title special customers would look on the back shelves for the single copies of older movies and more obscure stuff (the "B" titles). Drive-ins were closing, but the hack producers of drive-in fare started producing movies that went direct-to-video. Most of the DTV B-titles were crap, exploitation pics shot in a garage with a hand-held mike for chickenfeed budgets. Not restricted by the MPAA ratings code, a way to distinguish a DTV title on the shelf was to feature T&A, and as this was the era of gratuitous nudity flicks, the onslaught of 80s nudie cuties was on.

Exploitation director Ed Hansen and John Carpenter regular Buck Flower wrote "Takin' It Off" and its sequel "Taken It All Off" and churned out what was probably the best of this kind of movie. A school for strippers is losing money and the owner Becky Lebeau, played by Mr. Skin nude scene queen Michelle Bauer, decides to save her school from the greedy landlord played by John Alderman. It's the umpteenth remake of the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney formula of "putting on a show" to save the (farm, orphanage, church, community center, stripper school). They manage to snag stripping queen Betty Bigones (Russ Myer regular Kitten Natividad) to perform with them, but a monkey wrench is thrown into the plan when new student Allison (80s porn queen Candie Evans under her real name Jean Poremba) can't bring herself to take her clothes off and hypnosis is used as a last ditch effort to save the day.

There's lots of bad 80s hair and hideous 80s fashions. The acting is largely beyond horrible. Kitten Natividad recites many of her lines like a child in a big paper costume in a school play, but Buck Flower himself is a hoot as Allison's hillbilly father; and Candie Evans must have been game to try something that didn't involve her getting smothered by some guy, because she is surprisingly good in her role. Hansen's direction is competent and the jokes in the script aren't bad. There's LOTS of full-frontal female nudity, and only one scene with male nudity and that's one male backside in a tender shower love scene. Some of the stripping is amateurish, but that's okay, and Kitten Natividad shows she's a good performer and dancer who loved what she did. The title song is annoying, but a few others ("Louisiana Lovers", "I Just Want You" performed by someone named Little Joe Shaver) on the soundtrack aren't. The movie is padded with extra nudity to get close to 90 minutes, but that's what a Mom-and-Pop video store customer would have rented Takin' It All Off for.

Kitten Natividad was 40 when this movie was made and her face was starting to age, but her body here is still in good shape. Sadly she hit the wall soon after. Candie Evans married one of the American Gladiators, started a family and left showbiz entirely in 1988. Their beautiful bodies are preserved on VHS tape. Takin' It All Off must have been a hugely successful rental as used copies pop up on ebay all the time. Hansen died in 2005, so it's up to Buck Flower or whoever owns the rights to Takin It All Off to put it out on DVD. They should be encouraged, because there aren't a lot of comedies made with gratuitous female nudity anymore, and that's ashame.

Back in the 1980s, regional cable providers like PRISM, Wometco Home Theatre, and SelecTV would air unrated soft core movies (no male full frontal, simulated sex) late on Friday and Saturday nights. Most were foreign productions from the previous decade, either British Benny-Hillesque sex comedies or badly dubbed Continental flicks that were the last gasps of non-government funded European cinema. Some of the movies were English language costume dramas that had scripts with actual plots and classical scores, shot on real locations with good lighting and real direction. Examples of these movies included 1985's "Nana", 1977's "Vanessa", and 1983's "Black Venus." French director Claude Mulot helmed this retelling of a Balzac-inspired tale of a struggling sculptor obsessed with a beautiful Caribbean muse in late 19th century Paris. 1979's Miss Bahamas Lolita Armbrister appears as the title character under the name Josephine Jacqueline Jones. Spanish actor Jose Antonio Ceinos plays Armand, the young sculptor introduced to Venus at a party by his patron Jacque (Emiliano Redondo) who also narrates the movie in voice over. Armand invites Venus home where he sculpts her, falls in love with her, and beds her. Armand's pride is his weakness, and when Venus tries to become a dress model to help pay Armand's rent he casts her out on the street. Venus is forced to survive by sleeping around, eventually ending up in a brothel. Armand finds he is unable to shake her memory, and unsuccessfully tries to find refuge in the bottom of a bottle.

Mulot must have had a real budget to work with because it's all up on the screen; sumptuous gowns, top hats and tuxedos with tails, manor houses, cobblestone streets, carriages, ballroom dancing, a classy sounding score, and a bevy of beautiful unclothed females. Jones shows off her achingly beautiful body several times, and virtually all of the women in the cast strip naked at one time or another. Look for 1963's British sex scandal icon Mandy Rice Davies as one of Venus's benefactors. Mulot uses the camera and the storyline to spice up the sex scenes much more than the expected contorted positions and exaggerated huffing-and-puffing. His choice of a character's voice-over works quite well to move "Black Venus" along for its 80-minute running time.

In the 1990s national cable channels like Cinemax and Showtime began producing their own softcore programming (the ubiquitous "cable porn" of today) and the Euro softcore movies were tossed by the wayside. "Black Venus" was available only as a bootleg on ebay or as a previously viewed rental at flea markets, and the bottom of bargain bins for years. It finally got released on DVD in late 2006. As an example of what softcore porn can aspire to and be in an age of Skinemax flicks set in the same Pasadena neighborhoods using the same 30 actors, it's well worth checking out.

Zack Snyder's adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 turned out to be an unexpected box office hit and was swarmed in controversy from the time it hit theatres. Obvious comparisons can be drawn to Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, also an adaptation of a Frank Miller comic book. Actors were shot in front of a blue screen for sixty days and backgrounds were CGI'ed in during a year of post-production to create a very dark and brooding atmosphere. Male characters are overly muscled in the comic book tradition and what few female characters there are are beautifully curved and scantily clad. Tough hard-boiled characters live and die by a dark philosophical code in the face of unspeakable evil.

The plot line of 300 is taken from the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC where 300 Spartan soldiers and an additional number of some thousands of other Greeks (glossed over in this movie) led by Spartan King Leonidas held off an exponentially larger army of the Persian Empire led by Emporer Xerxes for several days before finally being surrounded leaving the 300 Spartans dead to the last man. The battle galvanized the Greeks into uniting as one nation and they ultimately repelled the Persians.

The first twenty minutes or so detail the tough and disciplined upbringing made to mold Spartan boys into warriors which recalls Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Leonidas (Gerard Butler of Phantom of the Opera) is informed that Emporer Xerxes wants him to surrender without a fight by a Persian messenger. The messenger insults Leonidas's wife and is thrown into a bottomless pit. Leonidas consults an oracle who tells him Greece will be conquered or a Spartan king will die. There is nothing left to do, of course, but assemble 300 of the best Spartan warriors and fight to the death.

The action gets underway pretty quickly after that and the carnage begins. The Spartans fight in helmets, brown Speedos, cavalry boots, red capes and nothing else. The Persian army looks very much like the human mercenaries who fought on the side of Sauren's army in Peter Jackson's The Return of the King. One of the Spartans is actually David Wenham who played Faramir in the Rings movies. Blood spatters, heads are chopped off, bodies get stacked up, limbs fly, and Leonidas gives Braveheartesque speeches about honor and glory and freedom in a Scottish accent. More and more fantastic elements are introduced as the battle wears on--giant rhinos and elephants, huge trolls chained until they are released to destroy, hand grenades(?), and one particularly nasty fellow with meat cleavers for arms. Xerxes (played by Rodrigo Santoro of Lost) is around eight feet tall, wears eye shadow and mascara, is laced with chains and body jewelry, and little else, and speaks in what must have been an electronically altered voice that is both effeminate and baritone at the same time.

If the viewer is looking for historical accuracy this isn't it. Several of the speaking parts for Persians are played by Blacks, although Persia was what is now Iran and the Persian Empire never extended into Africa. Leonidas calls the Athenians "Philosophers and boy-lovers" but what really stopped the Persian advance was a sea battle fought by Athenians that sank most of the Persian navy. Quite often the 300 seems to be number around 50 in this movie, and the Persian army probably numbered around 300,000, not 2,000,000 as depicted here. The movie has been criticized by the latte liberal crowd as racist and homophobic; as well as celebrated by what is left of enthusiastic supporters of President Bush as a metaphor for the War on Terror: a few devoted REAL MEN defending white civilization against the barbaric brown-skinned horde while liberal surrender monkeys stab them in the back at home . Parallels could actually be drawn to Al Qaeda terrorists as well, with 300 depicting men raised since birth to take their own lives in a struggle against an evil foreign empire of infidels.

Presumably Frank Miller had none of these geo-political concerns on his mind when he put pen to paper and wrote an 88-page comic book about the Battle of Thermopylae. And Zack Snyder probably didn't either when he decided to put it on the big screen. The big screen is the place to really enjoy what is essentially a good rip-snorting action-filled popcorn flick in the tradition of Roland Emmerich's Independence Day. Don't think too much when watching this movie. Sit back, get comfortable, and just go with it.

In 1992 Miles O'Keefe told Joe Bob Briggs on TMC's "Joe Bob Briggs' Drive-In Theatre" that the audition process for the title role in John Derek's "Tarzan the Ape Man" consisted of being dressed up in a wig and a loincloth with other Tarzan wannabes and taken to a park in LA where they were told to swing around in the trees and make noise. "...and people were throwing things at us and it was--a mess! And on the basis of that that I got the part." Originally Lee Canalito got the title role, and footage was shot of him as Tarzan, but ultimately Miles O'Keefe was brought in. The orangutan who played Cheetah got taken on the publicity tour and Miles was not taken, presumably so he would not upstage Bo Derek.

After a memorable turn in Blake Edward's "10" Bo Derek settled into a brief career of movies directed by her husband John Derek as a chance to showcase his wife's boobs. "Tarzan the Ape Man" was the first of these, with Bo getting top billing as Jane, Richard Harris as Jane's father getting second, Cheetah the orangutan getting third and Miles as the title character getting fourth. Not much happens in the movie, there's mostly a lot of walking through the jungle until Bo announces "I THINK I'LL TAKE A BATH NOW". She continuously holds her index finger up to her lips for reasons not really comprehendable. Her husband's direction, according to Miles, was "Honey, get your breasts up." Richard Harris yells every line he has, Miles O'Keefe says it was because he was bored. Tarzan finally shows up halfway through, but he has no dialogue. All action scenes are done in slow motion so it ruins the effect and makes them way too long.

Despite 38 full breast exposures "Tarzan the Ape Man" is truly one of those movies that is so bad it's bad. Even people who love bad movies don't like this movie. There is no rating in this review because there is no way on IMDb to give a movie zero stars.

This show was one of several reality match-up TV shows that aired in the first half of the Y2K decade. Ostensibly the producers would set up a couple and film their blind date while adding lascivious commentary. "A Dating Story" aired on the The Learning Channel on weekdays and billed itself as a nicer classier version of the blind date program that featured real people. It was produced by Philadelphia's Banyan Prodcutions, producers of "A Wedding Story", and "A Baby Story" as well.The first few seasons would feature the man, the woman, and the matchmaker, plus a voice-over in the beginning introducing the participants.

In the fourth season the show added a hostess; a very pretty blonde named Sabrina Soto who spent time with the man and the woman and gave commentary before and after each commercial break. The daters pretty much became attractive white twentysomethings; dates became untraditional activities like glass-blowing or beer-brewing; and episodes became more contrived with the producers attempting to create friction.

It was on that fourth season that the guy who is typing this comment appeared. I was set up with a smoking vegetarian who didn't like guys who worked in an office, which I do. We had no chemistry. They bought her a dress that they thought I would like, and made me give her a scented juju candle as a gift. Sabrina Soto stated we were both believers in the paranormal--we aren't---and millions of people out there think my idea of a first date is to take a girl to a fortune teller. We were told what to say and do the whole time, and at the end of the episode I walked her to an SUV that wasn't hers which she drove around the block and parked again. Then they drove her home and gave me ten bucks for cab fare and told me to get lost.

The episode ended up airing in early 2004. It was rerun once and then "A Dating Story" was canceled soon thereafter. A few months later I received several phone asking me to sign a still photo release form which I ignored. Finally when the last phone call came the caller got impatient with me and yelled "HELLO?". I hung up on him. TLC still reruns episodes but luckily mine never airs.

To this day, my uncle will still bring up Sabrina Soto, remarking "There was really something between you and that hostess. Why didn't you try and ask her out?" To which I can only say that as far as I can tell Ms Soto moved back to LA after A Dating Story's cancellation to open health food store. The website for that store is down, and I don't know what happened to her after that.

Fantasy book author William Nicholson made his first and so far only effort at movie-direction with this 1997 English Gothic romance based on his own screenplay. Sophie Marceau (the French princess in Braveheart) plays a Swiss governess named Elizabeth in late 1830s England. Desperate to pay a family debt, she sells herself to an anonymous English gentlemen for three days in his efforts to produce an heir for his family. Harsh and uncaring at first, they fall in love, but both have agreed never to see or speak to each other again for the sake of keeping up appearances. Elizabeth conceives a baby girl who is wisked away seconds after birth. Heartbroken, Elizabeth writes letters to "My English Daughter" until she can no longer keep her promise. Seven years after the baby's birth she tracks the child down; now a spoiled brat living on a remote Sussex estate. The daughter acts up as she pines for her usually absent father. Her father's wife has been in a vegetative state for a decade after a riding accident, and even the the daughter knows she is not the real mother. Elizabeth takes a job as the girl's governess to be close to her, unbeknownst to the girl's father. When the father, Charles Godwin, returns from London he is appalled at the mother of his child showing up again in his life as well as the rekindling of a romantic fire he has desperately tried to convince himself is long burnt out. Themes of duty to family, maternal love, and desperate attempts to hold back passion are played out in perpetually foggy and snowswept landscapes and around fireplaces in the Godwin Victorian mansion.

Performances by the actors are uniformly excellent. Marceau and Stephen Dillane as Charles Godwin share a chemistry rarely captured on film; but also look for Dominique Belcourt as the daughter; Lia Williams as Godwin's long-suffering sister-in-law; Kevin Anderson as the visiting American who falls for Elizabeth; and veteran British actor Joss Ackland as Godwin's father whose self-indulgent hedonism dooms the family to ruin. It's never apparent that this is Nicholson's first time out as a director. Nic Morris's cinematography of the English countryside and Marceu's exquisitely beautiful face lit by firelight is something to see, and Christopher Gunning's string-laden score is dramatic and over-the-top which it really should be.

Although rife with gray and icy colors, painful family obligation, stark settings, heartbreak, euthanasia, held back emotions, and rigid social mores; the underlying theme of the Firelight is that true love conquers all. It's never really gotten the attention it deserves.

Released by Disney's Hollywood pictures, the movie played briefly in American arthouses back in 1998 and was released on VHS the next year to very little fanfare. Disillusioned, Nicholson never directed a picture again, although he hit paydirt when he co-wrote the script to Ridley Scott's Gladiator in 2000. Firelight has been sporadically available since then on demand on the Encore movie cable channel. A Region 0 bare-bones DVD was released in Hong Kong of all places; it's available on Amazon.com and ebay. If you find a copy, it's definitely worth purchasing.

Back during the height of President Ronald Reagan's popularity Hollywood produced a slew of all-American-hero-kills-the-Commies flicks, best typified by the wretched Sylvester Stallone vehicle Rambo: First Blood Part II. Red Dawn (the first PG-13 movie) was released in the middle of all of those and maybe that's why it gets vilified in viewer reviews on IMDb.com and gets a one-star rating in the info pop-up when it airs on cable; it's lumped in with mindless action flicks best left consigned to the dumpers out back of bankrupt mom & pop video rental stores.

Red Dawn details teenage boys who hide out in the Rocky Mountains after an invasion of America by a Communist army. The boys return to town and stunned by the oppression launch a guerilla war against the occupying troops. The boys take the name Wolverines, after their high school football team. It stars Patrick Swayze and C Thomas Howell, who had appeared together previously in Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders, and their performances here are not their finest work. Some adrenaline-filled action sequences are actually quite watchable.

The movie is often lambasted for being unrealistic, but the situation presented is far closer to real life than Sylvester Stallone destroying the entire Vietnamese army with an explosive tipped bow-and-arrow. The Communist soldiers aren't presented as sadistic killers who invade America out of spite. And if nothing else, this movie evokes a time when young men in America fantasized about fighting a guerilla war, rather than our current war where fat losers slap a yellow sticker on their SUV as if that will stop a centuries old civil war in Iraq.

Joe Tartaglia got the chance to direct his coming-of-age-in-South- Philly script in 1997 when an aspiring actor friend (Ronald Samuel Jacobs) transplanted in Las Vegas agreed to put up $17000 in exchange for a co-starring role in the production. Tartaglia cast mostly family members and friends and neighbors. Shooting took place over four days in locations almost exclusively within a three block area on the then mostly deserted southern stretch of Philadelphia's Ninth Street Italian Market. Although Tartaglia didn't plan it that way, Punctuality has ended up being a snapshot of the neighborhood just before immigrants and yuppies swarmed all over the area.

Punctuality stars Tartaglia's younger brother Frank as 19-year old Anthony DeMarco who wants to become a comic-book artist. His father, recently released from prison, wants him to get a "respectable" job down at the local mob hangout and arranges to have the local mobster Nicky Nuts (Tartaglia's electrician uncle Domenick in an amazing performance) employ him as errand boy. He turns out to be good at his job, and as his star rises he is torn between the Italian old school grown-up world and his peers in the more racially-integrated hip hop crowd. Ronald Samuel Jacobs plays Angelo, a thuggish John Gotti wannabe whose desperate efforts to pay a debt to Nicky Nuts cause him to cross paths with Anthony and Anthony is forced to make a life-changing decision.

Like the streets it was shot on, Punctuality is gritty. Acting sometimes is subpar although other times it's impressive. As the tagline suggests, this is Tartaglia's directing debut and sometimes it shows. The dialog is full of Italian South Philadelphia colloquialisms, and at times it is deliriously profane. The soundtrack is eclectic, including old school South Philly crooner Fabian, some impressive hip-hop freestylers, and Philadelphia punk legend Mikey Wild. The movie won audience favorite awards at several film festivals, but at 54 minutes running time and padded as it is, it didn't get picked up by distributors looking for feature length projects.

Punctuality was ahead of its time. These days, with digital video and You Tube, it could have been self-produced and self-distributed for even less money or even put online like fellow Philadelphia student film maker Maya Churi did with her feature Letters From Home Room not two years later.

As for the Tartaglias, the gentrification of their old neighborhood hasn't driven them away. They are still there on 9th Street, and many members of the cast are still living and working there too (the guy who played short-tempered gangster Big Frankie is actually a cheerful friendly guy). They've opened up a theatre in their mother's old storefront, where they showcase local talent. If you catch him in between booking acts, Joe Tartaglia will be happy to sell you a copy of Punctuality for around five bucks, or will give it to you for free if he's in a good mood.

Back in 1992 B-movie action hero Miles O'Keefe was interviewed on TMC's Joe Bob Brigg's Drive-In Theatre. Briggs mentioned Phantom Raiders, a Filipino movie notable for having a 30 page script, the average movie script being around 120 pages. O'Keefe said he was told "Don't worry about the script, we'll fill up it up with action. We'll fill up the rest of the pages with action." Briggs said he hadn't seen the movie and asked did they fill up the rest of the pages with action to which O'Keefe replied "I don't know, I never saw the movie either! All I remember was being handed a machine gun and running through the jungle and shooting this machine gun and Filipinos dying all the time. I don't remember anything about a story." Miles' memory was accurate, because that's pretty much all the movie is. An apparent attempt to fuse the traditional Filipino girls-in-bikinis-with-machine-guns genre with the Reagan-era cold-war action flick; this Rambo rip-off features O'Keefe killing Filipino extras for 85 tedious minutes and almost no dialogue. The film is dated 1988 but it has the look and feel of a movie from the 1970s. Interior scenes are poorly lit so it's kind of difficult to view what's going on when characters are indoors. Exteriors are supposed to represent a Communist terrorist training camp in Vietnam but are probably around ten acres of Filipino jungle. Dubbing of the actors' voices isn't quite in sync with mouth movement, giving the impression of a foreign language film even though the actors are speaking English.

A bare-bones Region Zero DVD was released in Hong Kong by Digiview Entertainment recently, O'Keefe is credited with the wrong character on the jacket. It's available either from Hong Kong sellers on ebay or maybe from street vendors who don't speak English in the Chinatowns of major American cities. It's not clear if this movie ever had a theatrical or video release before now, Digiview probably found a master tape gathering dust in a warehouse somewhere and Miles O'Keefe probably wishes it stayed there. The rating for this is 1 out of a possible 10, solely because IMDb doesn't allow for no stars..