Erika Eleniak – Podcasting Them Softly

I love a good low budget Die Hard clone, especially when it stars Eric Roberts and Dean Cain, B Grade poster kids for decades and lovin’ it. Christmas Rush is as scrappy as they come, a cop flick with Cain as the disgraced detective stripped of his badge on Christmas Eve. Roberts is Jimmy Scalzetti, reformed jewel thief who has come out of hiding for one last mall heist to pay for his dying kid’s operation. Cain happens to be be picking up his wife (Erika Eleniak) at the very same mall and… you can guess where it goes. The pair of them actually have decent hero/villain chemistry and charisma, Roberts makes for an engaging antagonist and always has fun, too. It’s a lazy throwaway piece at heart though, an exercise in background noise on 2am cable. There’s something fairly festive about seeing Dean and Eric chase each other around the mall in little go karts though, and almost serves as a silly deconstruction of the action/hostage shtick if it weren’t so brainless. Also titled blandly as ‘Breakaway’ on North American DVD, it’s much better with its original festive title. Christmas Rush indeed.

-Nate Hill

Exterior, Miami Beach. A hardened mercenary (everyone’s favourite tough guy, William Forsythe) has just returned the kidnaped daughter of a businessman, and the guy says “I don’t even know what to call you guys.” Forsythe’s Simon replies “Just call us the Librarians… lets just say we return overdue books”, with a straighter face than David Caruso’s Horatio Cain on CSI, another ludicrous Miami tough guy. Anyways, that’s the kind of knowingly asinine B Movie Glory (trademarked at this point) that we have here, but it’s a good bit of fun, to quote a certain Tarantino character. Forsythe’s off the books squad deals in locating the victims of human trafficking, and bringing the pain to those who perpetrate it. He’s joined by Prison Break’s Amaury Nolasco, martial arts star Daniel Bernhardt and former playboy bunny turned B movie maiden Erika Eleniak. Their next task: rescue the kidnaped daughter of a mysterious billionaire (Michael Parks Skypes in a cameo that contains more gravity than the rest of the film combined, not to mention more than it deserves) from the clutches of a slimy crime lord (Andrew Divoff in full villain mode). It’s routine and predictable, punctuated by off the wall one liners, porno lit sex scenes, low grade gunfight last and sloppy hand to hand combat. I still can’t get over that aforementioned snippet of dialogue though, it sums up what glorious little gems like this are all about, encapsulates the B action film and Forsythe delivers it with that knowing little smirk that’s says it all. Watch for familiar faces like Ed Lauter, Forsythe’s own daughter Rebecca, Christopher Atkins and more. Oh yeah, and Burt Reynolds shows up briefly as a shady character credited (he actually had his name removed from the roster, understandably) as ‘Irish’. His first and middle names could be ‘Not’ and ‘Actually’, because the brogue he uses here is worse than Tommy Lee Jones I’m Blown Away and Dennis Hopper in Ticker combined, it’s a perplexing, cringy cameo. Hilarious stuff.

-Nate Hill