Episode 3 - Steel Frontier - The PM Entertainment Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You have had the Entertainment podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hello and welcome to an all new episode of the
PM Entertainment Podcast. The show that sifts through the endless,
shattered glass and exploded rubble of a very particular run
of late eighties and nineteen nineties action films, to find
true beauty in the manic performances, the neon, huge cinematography,
and watching grown men, while on fire, throw themselves through
and off things. I of course refer to the mighty

(01:23):
and important work of two men just looking to follow
their dreams of making a movie and ended up making
over one hundred. It's Richard Peppin and Joseph mehe In
nineteen eighty nine who formed PM Entertainment, which emerged as
a stunt heavy, vehicular madness embracing and a huge wall
of flame, beacon of the straight to video scene and
a scorched earth breeding ground for martial artists, stunt people

(01:47):
and actors who once played Tarzan. I'm your host, John Cruss,
and don't forget. If you like the show, please remember
to rate and review us on any of the podcasting
platforms you use, share our Facebook posts, like comment, and
you can contact us via our email Pmentpod at gmail
dot com. That's pm e Ntpod at gmail dot com,

(02:10):
our guest this week. For the last eighteen years in counting,
has consistently reviewed direct to video and VHS action thriller
and occasionally erotic thriller gems on their blog Dtvconnoisseur dot
blogspot dot com or Direct to Videoconnoisseur, and is currently
tantalizingly close to their two hundredth episode of the dtvc podcast,

(02:32):
which I strongly urge you all to go subscribe, to listen,
to share, and shout for the top of a skyscraper
about to all and any who will listen. I'm guessing
if you're on the roof of a skyscraper, it's mostly
maintenance people, helicopter pilots and Gary Daniels or c Thomas
Hall who spend their time hanging off the edge of
them ladies, germs, and those who dance to their own

(02:53):
delightful and unique rhythms. It's the man beneath the orange muxiicap,
author of several tremendous novels, and a guy who just
proved that yes, even Sir Peter O'Toole want slummed it
in a DTV action flick. It's the one, the only
Matt Piria. Sir, Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Thank you for having me. I'm excited. Excited to get
it at some PM entertainment.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yes, fantastic. So were you always into action films from
an early age?

Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think one of the
things I remember, I mean, obviously, like the Chuck Norris
movies and the Bronson movies. They used to play on
think called the movie Loft in Boston, so we got
Boston TV channels where I lived, and so you know,
we used to see those. But I think one of
the funniest memories I had of an action movie was
watching Leitho up in two with my dad and watching
him call out the tropes like he was just like

(03:43):
was predicting the movie before it happened. And that kind
of actually made the action movies more fun and maybe
get into even more so. Yeah, and then you know,
little budget stuff I think showed in a Little Tokyo.
That was the one that kind of got me made
me realize that there are movies that just go direct
to video that are as much fun. And that's when
you start getting to like Dona, Dragon Wilson, you know
broth rocked out those kinds of names.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Oh yeah, definitely, definitely. And can you remember when you
first came across a PM Entertainment film specifically and when
you put together the sort of PM was a company
that was sort of putting out lots of different films,
Like I know for a fact like that when we
used to see the Cannon logo whenever we go, oh, okay,
it's a Cannon film, you know, Vidmark and a restaurant

(04:26):
and things like that. Can you remember when you first
saw PM and when oh, I think I've seen one
of these before, and I like, you know.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
I don't remember exactly. It's more like I remember in
like the early nineties, when you know, these movies would
be on cable that I just started to notice, like, oh,
I'm seeing that logo a lot, Like they're starting to
come up more kind of like like another one would
be Imperial. Like I wouldn't remember when I first saw
the Imperial logo, but it's one that I recognized. And
it wasn't until later that I put too and two
when I started doing the site and people started saying, hey,

(04:53):
you should watch this movie. Watch that movie, and I
was like, oh, wow, yeah, this is a whole thing
that I used to you know, this logo that I
used to see when I was a kid, it actual,
you know, stands for something a little bit more.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I didn't even realize it until
watching sort of watching movies for the Doctor Action and
kick Ass kid shows. So it's really only in the
last fifteen years that I've even been aware of it,
although I may well have seen them back in the
day and video. I mean, I used to rend stuff
like this all the time, but I you know, it
wasn't until much later that I twigged who PM was

(05:22):
and and really looked into it. Do you have a
favorite PM film or sort of a favorite top five
PM films?

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, I think it's it's it always goes back and
forth between Recoil and The Sweeper. For me, those are
the two that I kind of one day, you know,
depending on when you get me, like I think right now,
maybe a little bit more Sweeper, but you know, I
could also go Recoil again. You know, those two just
to me that the between the spirou Rosatto's action direction

(05:51):
in them, the leads, which the fact that I'm putting
c Thomas Hall in the same conversation is Gary Daniels.
But it's just it's that good. Yeah, the sequences, the
chase sequences, the shootouts, all of it. It's just yeah.
Those two, for me are my two favorites. That zero
Talent is a close third.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
You can admit it. You like men with goaty beards
and ridiculous leather waistcoats.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
In House of Pain hats.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
That House of Pain hats, all right. So our film
on this episode it is the Joe Lara and Brian
James starring post apocalyptic western that features PM Entertainment's largest,
loudest and possibly most dangerous explosion ever committed to celluloid,
along with Caine Hodder and a stunt woman taking a

(06:35):
knee to the happy place. It's Steel Frontier. It's from
nineteen ninety five, directed by Paul Vulc and Jacobson Hart,
who was the pul Vulk was the man behind the
men at PM Entertainment. He worked on damn near every
single film they ever put out in some capacity, most
often as the editor. It is written by and co

(06:55):
directed by Jacobson Hart, who so far I think basically
wrote my top ten favorite PM entertainment films of all time.
We're talking Rage, Guardian Angel, Lion Strike or Ring of Fire,
three t Force, Zero Tolerance, Cyber Tracker, Direct, Hit, Repo,
Jake the Sweeper, Executive Target, and more. I mean, come
on now, those are like top level PM entertainment films.

(07:18):
Jacob and Hart won a legend, and the stunt coordinator
for this one is actually Michael J. Saner, who did
work with Spiro quite a bit on a lot of
other PM films, and he also gets help from Cole
s McKay, who is another frequent stunt collaborator. We'll talk
about Cole s McKay on another episode because he mainly

(07:39):
kind of works on the Rick Peppin films and we'll
get to one of those eventually, but Sana did stunts
for other PM productions like Outpa, Blood, Ring of Fire
two to Be the Best Firepower, Steel Frontier, and Rage,
all of which are fantastic. So he's definitely one to
look out for if you see him in the in
the credits on IMDb. Probably worth checking out that movie.

(08:02):
And before we review and chat about the film, we

(08:25):
have a legless bloody man. Fistfights, gunfights, blood squibs, men
falling through windows, a motorbike driving through a window, a
motorbike jumping out of an explosion, a tricked out motorbike
that can launch grenades from a little pipe, a motorbike
mounted voice activated gattling gun called angel. A stunt man

(08:45):
already on fire, almost landing on a motorbike before it
then explodes, seemingly engulfing him. And I presume just killing
him outright, because when you see it on the film,
you're just like, that's insane. No one could have survived
that stunt. Futuristic mad man converted automobiles, car chases, car
rex a bus chase, multiple and glorious explosions. Men in

(09:06):
berets with daddy issues, desert dwelling mongols called roadcheaters, gratuitous harmonica,
gratuitoust Brian James whaling, and man tears, really gratuitous Cane
Harder wearing a hockey mask in blazoned beret self branding,
impractical but luxurious hair ab sailing down a giant brick,
smokestack chimney, an enormous bowl shattering explosion, Joe Lara in

(09:29):
slow motion desert roads and spaghetti Western Echoe Corals on
the soundtrack. It's an incredible film, Matt, Why don't you
take tell the listening several what the plot of Steel
Frontier is.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah, so it's it's essentially it's a mashup, or it's
essentially PM's take on the late eighties Serial eight Santiago
Roger Corman post apocalyptic film with a little bit more
western in it. But yeah, the idea is that there's
a town called New Hope in the the future of
twenty nineteen post apocalyptic future. This town farms old tires.

(10:04):
That's the economy in this in this future, this is
not the New Hope here in Pennsylvania. That's a beautiful
little place to visit. This is a desert wasteland, California.
But yeah, they get attacked by this group called was
it the New Order or the Death Raiders they're called
or something death Death.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Yeah, they're the Death Writers, but they the United Regime.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
So they take over this place and it's it's not good.
And then Brian James is the leader of the United Regime,
but he puts his number one, Lieutenant bo S. Benson,
and then his son who's like this sniffling little worm
of a sun kind of person in charge of the
conquered New Hopetown while he goes to conquered more places.
And so they're leading this place.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Ran James said, you've got me for three days, right
exactly exactly, So we've put him at the beginning of
the movie in the end of the yeah, because he's
off building an empire, right exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
So yeah, So then one of the things is that,
you know, this is sort of like you know, those
those old iron curtains, James, where you can't escape, and
so they when people do escape, they go out and
fetch them, and in this case, they go to fetch Lara,
and after Lara, you know, dispatches with a good amount
of them because he's got a this this this is
where you get a little bit of Warrior of the
Lost World. Lara is a rogue frontiersman with a bike

(11:15):
and you know, you know, gunslinger and so yeah, he's
getting chased by these guys in their post apocalyptic vehicles.
He's like launching grenades from from little pipes underneath all
this kind of stuff. But they eventually catch him. They
bring him into the town and he makes a name
for himself as like Hey, I'm you know, you could,
I could join your gang. He he has a.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
Jimbo's it right, right, but it's it's it's so it's
a little mad Max, a little Warrior of the Lost World.
Well actually technically it's more of the road Warriors, more
Mad Max too, a little bit that little bit Warrior
of the Lost World, a little bit Yo Jimbo, and
a little bit high plane drifter. Like it's put that
all into a part. Add the PM magic add Joe.
Laara is luxurious but thoroughly in practical head and that's

(11:57):
kind of what we're talking about.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Yeah, And and essentially, as the film goes on, Laara
from within this group, he is, you know, taking them out.
He's you know, finding ways to get them to shoot
each other, you know, taking you know. Then of course
he meets a young woman, Stacy Foster, who we know
from the Cyber Tracker films. She's Don's love interest. There,
she's there's the you know, beautiful woman. You know. One

(12:21):
of the things I think that was good about the
Future in twenty nineteen is that somehow they were able
to hoard hair care products and so our two stars
have nice looking hair.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
I mean silky silky. I mean he's he's conditioning somewhere
along the line.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Right exactly, And so essentially what happens is he just
kind of cleans out the town eventually, then Brian's got
to come back with his gang to try to take
them back over, and we got the big, huge standoff
at the end. And normally those big standoff at the end,
they're they're kind of fun, they kind of do their thing.
But in pure pure PM style, this one has to
end in a car chase that just ends in spectacular fashion.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
Of course, Yeah, it's fantastic. Well the ending, well we'll
get to it, but yeah, is incredible. The only other
thing we have both Spenson in the movie, but he's
a mainstay of many of the Italian and Spanish shot
b movies and post apocalyptic films, so it makes sense
that he's knocking about this, But he plays he's a

(13:17):
little ambiguous to the whole thing, or a little bit.
I think he's a little bit done with the regime
that he's working under. I think he you know, if
it was just Brian James he'd have to deal with,
he'd be fine with it, But dealing with Brian James's
sniveling beret wearing sun who has no backbone and no
idea about anything. I think he's driving him a bit nuts.

(13:39):
I think Lara recognizes that, like Lara's lone gunman kind
of recognizes that, and therefore they are compatriots without necessarily
like if Svenson like came up again, like Lara would
kill him. But Svenson is all but by the end
of the movie, he's just like, I'm out of here
kind of thing. So he's sort of this interesting ambiguit.

(14:00):
His character. Brian James's presence is felt throughout the movie
despite as I say, he's really only in a few
scenes at the beginning and a few scenes at the end,
but you feel him throughout the movie like they they
they what I call like Donald pleasants him very well,
like a lot of these b movies that Pleasants is in.
He really only gave him three or four days on set,

(14:22):
but those the right directors that he worked with made
that count and distributed him throughout the film in a
good way. And I think Brian similar. I think similar Brian,
they do a really good job kind of and Brian's
having a ton of fun in this film. I mean,
he is loving every minute of it. So the reason

(14:44):
why I brought High Planes Drifter in kind of one
of the Well, let's we can start at the beginning
with like some of our favorite scenes and we'll we'll
get to it. But what were your before we get
to the favorite scenes? What was your overall thoughts? Like
if you have like a minute in an elevator to
tell one about this movie, what what were your thones?

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah? I mean I think if if you were to
say to me, like Matt, what would be your dream
like PM take on like the late eighties, you know,
Siri Antis, Sirius eighth, Santiago, uh, post apocalyptic thing, what
would it be? I would put something together that wouldn't
have been this, and I would have been wrong. This
is this is beautiful, like this is this is more.
This is what you want this movie to be without

(15:24):
knowing this is what you want this movie to be.
I guess that's the best way to say it.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
I just I think that it's better at the end,
I think than it is at the beginning. I like,
you know, it kind of builds well, which I think
is again it's what you want from a good movie.
You want it to sort of keep working. But I
mean it just like like that sequence we're talking about
favorite scenas in a bit, I just yeah, I it's
it's a classic PM film in that sense that it
it just sort of slowly builds, it builds itself up

(15:50):
to something that when it gets to the end, it
all pays off. And yeah, I mean Laura is a
lot of fun, Like you said, Brown James is a
lot of fun. It just it's a good way to
spend I mean, it's a little bit long for PM.
It's about it one hundred minutes, but it's it's a
good way to spend one hundred minutes.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Oh one hundred percent. I mean I've been watching a
lot of movies down here while I've been working, and
I've watched a few, like straight to VHS horror movies
from sort of the eighties and nineties that man, even
watching them just with out of the side of my
eye feel like they're only eighty five minutes and they
feel like four hours. I mean they're just you're watching him,

(16:26):
You're like, does this ever reach any kind of crescendo?
You know what I mean, Like, is this ever gonna
get good? Or you know what. I then rewatched Steel
Frontier today, you know, the other time. The first time
I watch Stel Frontier, I watched it on my big screen,
and you know, and I really couldn't believe it. I mean,
I was so I was so taken with it from

(16:47):
the opening frame. I immediately got, I know what you
say about it building and it's a little slow beginning,
but and it's certainly not the same rhythms that PM
would deploy in other films. It feels very much its
own standalone thing, even though it has, you know, a
ton of PM traits throughout the movie that we could

(17:08):
talk about. But to me, both times I watched it,
so the second time I watched it, the the you know,
our forty minutes or whatever that it is, they flew by,
like even even watching it again, like they absolutely flew by.
I think it's a I actually think it's a very
well paced movie. And that might be because I'm getting

(17:31):
more into the kind of Western I think what it
is is I was when I first watched the movie.
I was genuinely surprised. And what I mean by that
is I love PM entertainment films, but PM entertainment films
tend to be like quick, we got we gotta you know,
we gotta get to the bus chase right away, you

(17:51):
know what I mean. And you have that like first
ten minutes where it's like for hicular madness and people
falling through windows and explosions and blah blah blah blah blah,
and then we kind of ease into a plot. That is,
the plot is decent enough to take us from action
sequence to action sequence. But you don't feel and I
don't mean to be overly harsh one, you don't always

(18:14):
feel like someone's joining the dots. You can join the
dots in your head while you're watching the movie, but
you don't have to often feel like someone's joining the dots.
The difference with Steel Frontier that I found is that
whether it's the plot, whether it's the dialogue, whether it's
the acting, or whether it's the cinematography, it's a movie
that looks like it's been thought about. Do you know

(18:36):
what I mean by that? A little more? It feels
like they went it actually feels like Jacob's and Heart
and Paul Vault when let's go off into the desert. Yeah, okay,
we only have fourteen days or whatever, and we only
have half a mil or whatever to make the movie.
But let's see what we can really achieve. And so
right from the get go, I mean, yes, of course,

(18:58):
it's a movie that wears its influence, is very heavily
on it sleeve. But I think it it successfully does
those influences. It doesn't I never feel like the opening shot,
which you've seen in adn't a hamny spaghetti westerns, and
even Sam Raimi does a version of it in his
spaghetti western The Quick and the Dead. But you know,
you see the lone guy walking through the desert and

(19:21):
he finds a guy who has a run in, who
has had a run in with these villains that we
are going to come to know over the next ninety minutes.
And in this case, they found a guy without legs.
He's a real man who sadly lost both his legs.
They dress him up so that he's like, you know,
gory and disheveled and whatever, and he's, you know, mouthing

(19:43):
that helped me, helped me kind of thing. And between Lara,
the way that they're shooting this movie, the cinematographer Richard
peppin the p of PM entertainment. As I said, it
feels like they got there and they went, let's like,
let's really make this look like something because it from
the establishing shot of the sort of mad Maxi villains

(20:08):
and they have that like Matte painting of a destroyed
city in the background driving across the desert, to the
opening sequence with Joe Lara and the gentleman without legs
in the desert, to then the operatic action sequence that
takes place while Brian James is getting a shave. It
just feels like and I think a lot of these

(20:31):
ninety five ninety six It's funny, I said when I
started this podcast, like, let's kick the show off with
a bang. Let's not do it chronologically. Let's do four
or five of the best right up front, so that
people get into the show, people get into the movies,
and there's a reason to keep listening. If we did
the city Lights twelve City Lights movies or the first

(20:52):
five PM entertainment movies, no disrespect to them, because I
like them, but they're a completely different type of movie.
They're not the the PM that people know and love.
This movie in ninety five comes right in its sweet spot.
It's right in that prime PM moment, and I don't
know what it is. Maybe they had a little more money,
maybe they had a little more time, or maybe they
were just between volk Heart and Peppin they were just like,

(21:17):
let's make this the best we can make it, because
I just think this movie looks a million dollars of
ten million dollars, it looks fifty million dollars. It looks incredible.
I think that Joe Lara is the best he's been
in any film that I've seen him in. In this movie.
I think the soundtrack is tremendous. We'll get onto that later.

(21:38):
I think Brian James and his sniveling son and Bo
Spenson are the perfect antagonists for this movie. I think
the violence and the stunts, I mean, the violence is
pretty raw. There's some pretty like you, yes, you're used
to seeing people shortle or used to seeing people you know,
have a martial arts fight or whatever, but like, there's
some there's some bits during the open sequence right up

(22:01):
until where they have to kill a lot of the
able bodied men. They don't want able bodied men lying
around causing a problem for Brian James's son, so they
killed him. Right up until that sequence. It's pretty like
if you're in the moment with the movie, it's pretty harrowing,
Like it's not it's not always just sort of comic

(22:21):
book violence. So I applaud this movie. It shot right
to the top of my top five favorite PM all
time movies. When I watched it, I loved everything about
it that there was. You know, I rewatched it again
now just to make sure it wasn't just because I
was in the moment or just the night that I

(22:41):
watched it or whatever, and I loved it again and again.
It has some phenomenal lines in it. Everyone is active
and like everyone is in the movie that they're meant
to be in. Do you know what I mean by that?
There isn't one guy in it that makes you go, oh,
he didn't get the memo. Everyone got the memo right.
So I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of this movie

(23:03):
and would recommend it, Like if you're starting your PM
entertainment journey, or maybe you watched I don't know, Rage
and Zero Tolerance a while back, but you haven't watched
anything else. I say find this. Put it on because
it is It's well worth your time. It's unfoursome and
free V and a bunch of the other streaming sites
right now. So check it out. Did you watch it streaming, sir?

(23:26):
Or do you own this?

Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yes? No, I did to be for this one.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
Yeah, okay, And was it edited or was it?

Speaker 3 (23:32):
Now?

Speaker 1 (23:32):
It was pretty bloody swearing. Yeah, it had everything you
want in it.

Speaker 2 (23:37):
So I had a bad experience with Pure Danger being edited,
and I didn't you know, some of the film Rise
who I think now owns it. I think film Rise
brought out Echo Bridge, but I think some of the
film Rise ones. Just be careful, folks if you're watching
them on the free streaming channels. Some of the film
Rise ones have uploaded the edited for TV version. Whether

(24:01):
film Rise just put up the wrong one, I don't know,
but just make sure. But yeah, if still Frontier is unedited,
please I would strongly recommend you go watch it, Matt,
would you as well?

Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yes, Yeah, for sure, I've got it, you know, looking
at I'm kind of I haven't redone my top ten
letterbox list, but this is this is number nine for me, now,
I kind of that's you know, I definitely move it there.
I enjoyed this one as well, I think too, and
maybe not to maybe I'm giving something away with this,
but I think there are a lot of bad tropes
in those late eighties post apocalyptic films that this one

(24:37):
doesn't go fully onto. So for example, there's no like
full on like rape scenes, you know, and so they
know they threaten it. Yeah, they threaten it a lot,
especially with Stacy Foster's character. They threaten it, but they
never fully go there, which I think is a fantastic thing.
You know, I think we normally you get like this
scene where the main character, you know, like kind of
a neo Jimbo way right, goes through some sort of

(24:59):
ordeal and has to you know, recover from ed ordeal.
Like there's a point where like say, like a Brian
James gets the better of him, and maybe because they
did only have Brian James for a short period, they
didn't want to go that route. But they don't do it,
which I think is another fantastic thing. Like I was
waiting for it, I was like, oh, you know, it's
twenty minutes left of the movie. Now it's a time
where they he gets defeated and he's you know, they're

(25:20):
string him up, maybe they're torturing him or something like that,
and then he recovers and beats them. They don't do
any of that here either, which I thought was good,
so definitely not. Was it a New Barbarians? I think
the one with Fred Williamson where where that that hero
definitely gets it really bad.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
I mean, there's there's an initiation ceremony that includes them
all beating seven shades of shit out him for reasons
known only to these mad backwards bikers. Right, but apart
from that, unlike Hologram Man, well, Lara just takes it
in the face the whole movie, basically, right, And when

(25:59):
we get to Hologram Man on this show, I will
explain why. There is a very good reason why Lara,
despite being the hero of Hologram Man, constantly is defeated.
But the thing I like about this is, you know,
I love a great action film. I love a great
exploitation movie. I love a great post apocalyptic movie. Like you, Matt,

(26:21):
I don't necessarily put as much stock in needless conflict
as a lot of those movies do. And actually, what
I love about this movie is exactly what you're saying.
He is smarter and better than them. However, he doesn't
like laud it over them. He uses it in a

(26:44):
very wise way. It's sort of that it's so funny
because we've talked about Hologram Man the other day, and
all through Hologram Man they keep going, oh, he's so
smart and he's about to do a really smart thing
and then never does. Where Steel Frontier is sort of
the movie where Joe Lara is legitimate Lee. He's sort
of the you know, he's quiet, he's you know, seft spoken,

(27:04):
he has he has a lot of like philosophical mumblings
kind of thing that he does throughout the movie. And
obviously he finds ways. I think, what I what I
really like about the movie and why it's so clever
is that And then again this is straight from High Planes,
Drifter and Neogimbo and a lot of those kind of
genre defining movies. Let's put it that way, is that
he finds ways around just driving into the town and

(27:29):
killing everyone initially in order to protect whether it's to
protect the town, whether it's to protect himself, or whether
it's to protect his female friend. Because everyone has designs.
All these meat heeaded bikers have designs on Stacy Foster
and he he you know, at one point he's like
playing poker with them and says, look, I'll take her

(27:51):
as as my winnings as a way to stop her getting,
you know, molested by these thugs. I think it's really
well done, and you know, especially like the bait and
switch where he tells everyone like, I think, I think
there's some guys in the shed, go or the barn,
go to the barn, and blah blah blah blah blah,
and then everyone kind of like shoots each other. Basically, Yeah,

(28:12):
it's very reminiscent. I just recently covered with Gary Hill
the Bruce Dern movie World Gone Wild, which if you
haven't seen it, it's again, it's from nineteen eighty seven.
It is in nuclear ravage Wasteland Earth twenty eighty seven.
Water is as precious as life itself. Isolated lost wells
outposts survived the Holocaust and the inhabitants guard the source

(28:33):
of their existence, and an evil cult of renegades kind
of shows up and wants they're valuable water. It's very
similar to that to that as well. And World Gone
Wild is another one that is done very very well.
So if you you know, if you're a fan of
this one, I can struct and a fan of Bruce
Dern and if you're not go Away because he's a legend.
But no, check out World Gone Wild as well because

(28:56):
it's very it's very close to this one in the
best possible way. So yeah, as you can tell, I'm
a big fan of this movie. I think it's one
of those, as I said, where just everything comes together.
I feel like everything comes together and they really think
about it correctly, and yeah, I mean just the little
back and forth, so kind of using this as a

(29:20):
as a segue into our favorite scenes, like the whole
sequence at the beginning after Brian James shows up in
the town and this bit is initially taken wholesale from
High Plane Strifter, but then merges into its own thing.
In High Plane Strifter, Clint Eastwood goes to get a
bath in a shave and during the shave people come

(29:41):
in to attack him and say, you know, you have
to get out into the town, get down into the
street and have a shootout or whatever, and he shoots
through his barber gown and shoots the guy just right
there while he's still all covered in shaving foam or
whatever it is, and then takes out the bad guys.
In this one, Brian James comes into the barber shop,

(30:04):
sits down, says like a shave, blah blah blah blah blah.
He shoots the sheriff through his barber gown. And then
while Brian James is having this like epic operactor it's
a very kind of Brian Depalmer kind of sequence. He's
getting this very like close shave, and there's all this
music playing you just see outside just insane carnage, and

(30:28):
it's a wonderful way for PM Entertainment to just be like,
all right, we've got to put some more action in here.
Let's just like do a ten minute, you know sequence,
because it's like it's like one of those old wild
were stunt shows that you would see at old two
Sun Studios or whatever. There doesn't need to be a
plot to the action. You know what the plot is,
Brian James has shown up. He's too cool for school,

(30:50):
so he's not gonna be shooting people. He's gonna have
his shave. And while he's having a shave, his thugs
are going to ransack the town. And therefore, in that ransackary,
you can kind of do whatever you want and it's
PM entertainment, So they do they bow shit up and
bikes drive through windows while on fire, and you know,
and kine Harder does kicks a woman right between her legs,

(31:13):
picks her up, and then breaks her back over his shoulder.
And I was just like, because you, like I say,
you see shit in PM entertainment films, but you don't
see that, like that's a little they're they're pushing the
exploitation elements a little bit that, right, Yes.

Speaker 1 (31:28):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And to your point too about the budget.
You know, they also in the movie Riot, they depict
a Riot's sequence on a budget, and they're really good again,
you know, with with Peppin and I think it was
Blakey who was there the or Blakely was the cinematographer
for Riot. But they're really good at sort of making

(31:49):
it look like there's all this chaos going on around them,
when really it's probably only a small little area that
this chaos is happening. But they make that look really good.
And I was struck by it. I mean, it reminded
me of the Riot sequence and Riot the way that
they did it. And but like you said, you get
these isolated moments while you've got this sort of this
chaos going. They picked these little isolated moments to show

(32:12):
these little things to kind of that you can kind
of iris in on. Yeah, it was. That was a
fantastic scenes. And like you said, to kind of add
in that that that that Clint Eastwood moment of him
getting the shave, you know, it's it's it's classic PM, right.
They pull things from other places, but they do it
in a way that it's like an homage that you
you enjoy watching.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
Yeah, And and the whole sequence kind of ends with
Brian James coming out having had his shave, surveying the
devastation that his people have wrought, and Bo Svenson, who
again kind of wants to be part of it, but
kind of doesn't want any part of it, like he's
sort of in the middle there. It sat there and

(32:52):
they say something along the lines of yet another great
success for the Death writers. Yeah, and Brian James looks,
you know, gives a thousand yard stare off into the
distance and goes, I've never liked that name and both
fence and says why not, and he goes, we ride
as a pack, Death rides alone, and then it which

(33:12):
by the way, phenomenal line, like I don't care where
they they, whether they took it from somewhere, whether they
whether they thought it up. Phenomenal line. I never liked
the Death Riders we ride in numbers, Death Rides Alone.
And then it cuts to the perfect like if I
was going to do a long desert road shot, it
would be this. You've got that the haze in the background.

(33:33):
You've got this like slight hills so you can see
so Lara is coming down on the motorbike from all
the way in the distance, and you've got that music
that like kind of coral spaghetti western, slightly Egyptian sounding,
so it's it's it's very similar for anyone who's seen
Six Strings Samurai or Bubba Ho Tep. Brian Tyler plays

(33:57):
with sort of very similar themes, but it's that kind
of like slightly minor key distortant, but also epic, like
it just fits. It fits with like that Arizona, Eastern
California long stretch of desert Highway, and you whoa kind
of thing and it's just one other movie do you have.

(34:20):
Brian James, like the b movie Legend saying like Death
Rides Alone and then it cuts to the perfect like
that's the scene you want after Brian James says death
rides alone. You want Lara with his perfectly beautiful but
thoroughly impractical hair blowing behind him on his motorbike, riding
the desert highway with this great like cinematic score. And

(34:45):
it's just, I don't know, man, like that that won
me over. I was just you know that with all
the violence and madness in the town, then cutting to Lara,
I'm like, you are setting this up so perfectly. You
are really established, like they set their table in this movie.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
So well yeah, yeah, no, no, I agree. I agree
that that definitely worked there. I mean I think you
know at night when he's camping and you get introduced
to the brocheaters and he's like trying to deal with them.
That was that was great stuff. And then yeah, that
next scene that next day when he gets captured by them,

(35:25):
that chase seat. It's classic PM.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
So it's like Chase scene man, when he because he
shows up. That's the scene where the guy who comes
out who's not George buck Flower, but he might be
like he looks he's kind of got like a George
buck Flower energy. He's not George buck Flower. But the
guy gets out of the the car and he's got
like the truck rather and he's got like the three
Days double and he's got the hat and and Lara

(35:47):
is enigmatically playing the harmonica like I love, like this
is awesome as well, like Lara is this harmonica player
solo writer, and they have this wonderful back and forth.
The guy's like it's hotter than Devil's pit us out here,
which is another great line, like so good, and he's
like I'm out here looking for some runaways, and like
Lara's just like yep, you know. He's like whatever, uh

(36:10):
and then he says, uh, what do you? What are you?
Are you a runaway? And he goes everyone Lara enigmatic
is always goes everyone's running from something, and he goes, uh,
this is how about you? You running from something? And
he goes do I need to? And then the guy
goes throws his sunglasses on and goes to get in

(36:32):
the truck. Lara is already like, oh shit, it's about
to go down. Like I thought I could get like
get away with just enigmatically playing the harmonica, answering his
question no, no, no, Lara's gonna get on his bike
and run. So he gets on his bike and as
the engine of the truck rolls up, you get these
like these drums, like these these like man Max two

(36:53):
or almost like Beyond Thunderdome kind of like and even
fury Rode like drum like almost like freaking rhythm kind
of drums. And it's like it, you know, And it's
funny because again, I love PM and say movies. Obviously
I'm doing a PM and Savent podcast, But their soundtracks
not always the best, right, They not always this they again,

(37:14):
it's one where they feel like they've spent some time
on the soundtrack, where they've gone what would look fucking
cool or what would sound fucking cool with Lara being
chased by like, you know, the budget Mad Max team
and and and it's I'm like, ah, like I was
watching it, I just oh, I got so excited, like

(37:35):
it was just fantastic.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
Yeah, I mean wonder because because Volk is the the
I think he's the music director as well. Oh yeah,
I think I think in the credits I saw that
that he was the music director. So I wonder. So
one of the things I think PM was known for
as well, is if the budget, if they had extra budget,
they put it somewhere. You know, I always think of

(37:58):
the sweeper, right where instead of spending the money on
a police precinct, they just have that the chief call
leave a message on the answering machine telling you know,
he tell how will he suspend it? Right, And so
then that that money goes this, you know, to spirou
Rosatto's blowing up, you know, auctionen tanks or whatever. And
I think it's gonna be a simil listening here, right.
I mean, I can't imagine the set locations cost them

(38:20):
a lot of money, right, it was probably you know,
they probably able to save a lot on that, and
then they could put that money into other things, like
you said, like the soundtrack. So yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:30):
Pull Pull.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
Vulk is the musical score producer, producer. Okay, So yeah,
they have a music department on this, so it's not
just sort of you know, library music or whatever you had.
They actually recorded a vocalist doing that music. They have
a guy doing the acoustic guitars. They have a percussion
Rick Craig, who does so I feel like a lot

(38:52):
of this was built and from the ground up school wise,
John Gonzalez is the guy who writes the music for this.
He does the music for La Heat Firepower, Ring of Pi,
he does Bikini Summer three, South Cheat. He is the composer,
like he composes the music for almost all these movies.

(39:13):
So listen. I don't know what he did right this time,
but like the soundtrack to Steel Frontier is absolutely phenomenal.
I love it.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
Well. I wonder too again, like if it was maybe
whether it was a time thing or you know, a
situation where they're like, okay, let's just not recycle music
from other movies, you know, I mean, yeah, you think
of what was it? Is it? Land of the Free?
Is that the one with Speakman?

Speaker 2 (39:35):
And yes, Land of the Free has probably and again
love payment Tim Foods. I'm doing a payment. But Land
of the Free has the worst, the worst soundtrack of any.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
We like that cassio for the chase scene. There's that
one chase scene where there's like a it's like a
cassio from Radio Shack. Yes, it's it's a beautiful thing.

Speaker 2 (39:55):
And it's funny. I had there's a version of Land
of the Free stream or on YouTube or something where
the mix for the audio has that soundtrack at the
same level as the dialogue, so in some sequences you
can't hear what people are saying. Thankfully, when I finally
got it on VHS and we watched it or DVD,

(40:17):
I think I have it on DVD and I finally
we watched it, the mix was much much better and
it didn't bother me as much this time. But when
you watch it streaming or when you watch it on
YouTube one, yeah, the soundtrack is just almost unbearable. But
Steel Frontier phenomenal soundtrack. Phenomenal. John Gonzalez did incredible work

(40:39):
for this one. Yeah, so that whole thing, the car chase,
after the heart of the Devil's Piss out here sequence,
Lara's bike, we find out, has little explosive grenades that
drop out of a pipe from the bag. He has
a shield that comes up on the back of his bike.
He has the voice activated gatling gun. He just goes

(41:04):
angel and this gatling gun like pops up from the
back of the motorbike and just starts mowing people down.
You've got, as I say, multiple cars chasing him. We
get car flips, we get explosions, we get all sorts
of great stuff. They do eventually capture him. We should
also mention that, along with a lot of kind of

(41:27):
Western and Italian and Philippine post apocalyptic propes, the other
thing that this movie does I actually think kind of
surprisingly because I can't think of another Western movie that
followed an osploitation classic and actually included what osploitation tends

(41:48):
to include, which are sort of in almost every odsploitation movie,
my favorite being Razor Back, and it has perfect example
in Razorback, a sort of the two giggly punks with
like zip face and crazy Hawaiian shirts and whatever. They
tend to talk in a very thick lock of stylet
ex seed, and they tend to be and I think

(42:09):
they call them okas, which are sort of down and dirty,
ossy ossy people basically like it's slang. It's Australian slang
for like, you know, the dirt and down and dirty characters.
In this movie, they have two characters. They have like
a kind of trash can man type of character from
the stand who's sort of a guy who you know,

(42:30):
believes to be picking up kind of messages or whatever,
and in fact is on Ta Lara from the beginning.
But because he's so nuts. No one really kind of
understands it. But he's the guy who comes up and
he's like, I know your secret, man, I know your secret. Like,
So they have that character who's like straight out of
a osplitation movie or straight out of a post apocalyptic movie.
And then they have the Chicken Man, who is again,

(42:53):
he's much closer to the kind of you know, wild
and weird oka characters that that populate os ploitation. But
I was so thrilled to see if you're as much
a fan of osploitation as I am. And I don't
just mean Mad Max, I mean go watch some other
titles that these kind of characters, whether it's Wake and Fry,

(43:15):
Razor Back, or they're in Crocodile Dundee has a couple
of them. There's some great examples in the Race for
the Yankees effort with Donald Pleasant's those kind of characters.
The fact that PM were like, well, we've gotta have
a couple of nutty characters in here, because that's what's
in all these movies. I loved it. I love that
they did that.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah, No, I agree. And funny note about this is
come up and Reviews reviewed this this movie, and the
guy who played the Chicken Man commented on their review
and he said that he was he wished the PM
to beate a sequel called Chicken Man's Revenge, that he
doesn't actually die in the movie. He comes back, you know,
but yeah, but he was like, yeah, I was Chicken

(43:54):
Man and the more Chicken Boy in the movie. And
they were just like, hey, you know in the comments,
they were like, here's our email, reach out and give
us some more stories about making that movie. But I
don't know if you ever reached out to them or not.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
Well, I will reach out to Chicken Man and I
will find out exactly what went on on the center
of this movie. Okay, so again it is time for
the interviews section of the show, and I think this
week we have really stacked up three fantastic conversations with you.

(44:27):
First up, we talk to director, actor and music score
producer Paul g Volk, who has basically worked on PM
Entertainment films and City Lights Entertainment films forever and knows
a lot of the behind the scenes stuff. He directed
Steel Frontier. He also additionally directed scenes from Lion Strike,

(44:51):
direct Hit, and directed Sunset Strip back in nineteen ninety two.
He also directed episodes of the la Het TV series
and a recent movie from twenty twenty four called The
Night They Came Home, which is a western that has
Danny Trejo in it, Robert Carodine, Philip Andre Botello, Charlie Townsend,
Patrick Durham, and Brian Austin Green. Definitely worth tracking down anyway.

(45:15):
So up first we have Paul Volk talking about the
making of Steel Frontier. After that we'll be speaking to
Steel Frontier's writer and co director and also an actor
in the film, Jacobson Hart, who, again, as we've spoken
about on the podcast many times, has written some of
the classic PEM entertainment films of all time. And then

(45:39):
lastly we speak to Brian Huckaber, who plays none other
than Chicken Boy, one of the great Death Rider Gang,
and he has lots of behind the scenes stories. He
also has a fantastic YouTube channel called hucks Pop Culture Cafe,
which I would strongly suggest you go over and check out.

(46:00):
We're going to be talking at all three coming up,
but first, as always, we do have to try and
cover some of the bills around here, so we will
have some commercials coming up right now. Then you'll hear
the interviews. Then after that there'll be a few more
commercials and back to the show. If you want to
support the show, then please don't forget to rate, review, share, comment, like, follow, subscribe,

(46:25):
tell people, tell people, tell people. Seriously, in this business
of podcast word of mouth is key, and I have
to say it has been absolutely fantastic over the last
few weeks to see on both Facebook and Instagram so
much interaction. We're getting a lot of comments, a lot
of messages, a lot of likes, a lot of shares.

(46:46):
That is absolutely fantastic. If you can go ahead and
rate and review the podcast, or at least tell your
friends and family about the podcast as well, that would
be fantastic. But I have to say, please keep up
all the interaction. It means so much fantastic. I look
forward to it every single day, and I really feel
that we have an awesome action community out there who
are paying attention and supporting us. So thanks so much

(47:09):
for that, and will keep providing you the podcast if
you keep listening, all right, Well, first up, it is
our conversation with Paul g Volk, who is the director,
an actor in the film and music score producer who
directed a few movies for PM. One of the ones
that I think most people will know for certain is

(47:33):
either direct Hit or Steel Frontier.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
Those are direct Hit.

Speaker 4 (47:37):
I just directed pickups for Okay, additional director, additional director, Right,
I'm in there. Steel Frontier, of course I directed that.
I mean, I share the title with Joe Hart. I
was very proud of Steel Frontier.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Yeah, it's a fantastic mashup, sort of a sort of
action Wesson. It was.

Speaker 4 (47:57):
It was a little bit more than the usual PM
at the time. Yeah, and well when the sound guys
the outside sound facility got it to start working on that,
they kind of confirmed that with me because they were like, whoa,
this is this is not your usual PM, which it wasn't.
I mean, I think I learned. I learned a very

(48:21):
good lesson. You got to keep cutting. It's too long.
I left it too long. I probably could cut fifteen
twenty minutes out of it, and I was really upset
about that.

Speaker 1 (48:32):
But you don't.

Speaker 4 (48:33):
You can't go back and redo it. But it was
it was a wonderful experience. Joe Lara was great guy.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
Another Entertainment regulars in He's.

Speaker 4 (48:43):
In yeah, right, Hologram Man I think it was.

Speaker 2 (48:45):
And uh and you have Bo's fencon of course. Wheah.

Speaker 4 (48:49):
Now bo Bo turned out to be a real asshole.
Oh okay, yeah, I was from from remembering him with
Robert Redford in The Great Waldo Pepper when we cat
I was all excited like, oh, well, bose fence and
then he gets to set and he's just an asshole.
Oh didn't happen a lot, but it happened with him.
Brian James was wonderful and just shooting it up in

(49:13):
the Pinnacles, you know. Yeah, that opening scene. Oh, that
opening scene that was a whole other Do you remember
the movie at all? Yes, the opening scene up in
the in the Pinnacles, which turned out to be just
Joe Lara ending the life of the of the legless guy.

(49:35):
That was not written as that. It was a big
action scene originally. And the car carrier that was bringing
up the vehicles broke down on the way up there.
So we're sitting there waiting for the car carrier with
all these different vehicles to arrive, and then we get
the call and we're in the middle of nowhere we

(49:55):
get the call that it broke down. You're not going
to be able to shoot with that. With those you
need to rewrite the scene with what you have now.
What we had was the legless guy. He really was
legless when you know, accident when he was young, the
stunt may he's a legless stuntman and Joe and Joe's
one pistol. And so me and Joe Hart sat down,

(50:18):
we thought about it and came up with that opening
where he just happens up, well, he happens upon the
guy laying there, the legless guy who's been obviously tortured
and left to die.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
Yeah, he says, who did this to you? Death?

Speaker 1 (50:33):
Writers?

Speaker 2 (50:34):
Kill me?

Speaker 1 (50:35):
Kill me?

Speaker 4 (50:36):
And we felt we thought that was am well. We
were just so happy we could come up with something.
But we felt that was very a very effective thing.
I don't know what other people thought, and.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
They know it's a good Western beginning. I feel like
I feel like that. You know, the westerns often, you know,
whether it's the spaghetti western. So the earlier American ones
are very often the sort of establishing shot is alone,
whoever the loan, gunment, loan, hero, loan or whatever it
is it is coming into town and on their way
into town, you know they meet that some some unique.

Speaker 4 (51:10):
Or yeah, and then we continue to Yeah. The whole
thing was kind of an homage to Sergio Leoni, the
guy getting shaved while the town's being you know, rampaged, and.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Right now, all that stuff is fantastic and I love
it because I think Rick was telling me that they
were they were happy, I guess to move the money
around as it suited the project. Is that sort of
what you felt with something like Steel Frontier or were
you get very strict direct directors?

Speaker 4 (51:37):
Actually, I mean, when I think back, I think it
was just we wrote enough action into the movie to
feel like it should sell. But well, I mean one
of the things that happened was we were set up
to do our big car chase day with it with
a helicopter and a gyroscope at the bottom of the helicopter. Well,
this was summertime up there by the pinnacles, you know,

(52:00):
basically Mojave Desert, and it was one hundred and twenty
some degrees and after not even a half a dozen
shots from the gyroscope, it broke down. It was too hot,
it stopped working, so we only got a few shots
helicopter shots. We had to shoot more, you know, from

(52:20):
the ground from other vehicles, which was really depressing, really
really upsetting. You know the fact that it was one
hundred and twenty people were wearing wet you know, towels
around their necks the whole time. It was it was intense. Ye,
that was a bummer that we didn't get to utilize

(52:40):
that gyroscope camera but a for a few shots. As
far as money, this is a funny well, I don't
know it's funny at the time, but it was near
the end of the movie. We were shooting the final
scene and we're shooting on film and Rick had been
in a bad mood. I don't know why. I think
he had gotten bad news about something or another. I

(53:02):
don't know if it was pertaining to the movie. Because
Rick shot Steel Frontier, he was the main director photography,
which I was so happy about because he's really good.
But Ken Blakey was the beak b unit or second camera,
and we hardly used second cameras at all back then.
Now we use two three cameras all the time, but

(53:23):
it's digital. But yeah, so we're basically one camera. But anyway,
Rick comes on set we're about to shoot the last scene.
We can tell he's upset, and Ken Blakey is shooting.
He looks at me and he goes, you have exactly
this many thousand feet of film to shoot. If you
don't get it with that, then you don't get it.

(53:43):
That's it that much. And he turned around and he
walked into a car and drove away. So and I
wasn't even sure why he was so upset, but he
was upset, and I could tell we have to get
the ending of the movie in that amount of feet
or we're not going to get it at all. So
as we shot this the different angles and different setups,

(54:04):
I'm looking at the side of the camera as it roll,
as the feet roll by. Right times, I even got
it just based on the feet. In my mind, I
kind of divided up what we had and what we
were shooting, and luckily we did get it. But I
mean that was unusual because Rick is a pretty good guy. Yeah,
and he's actually made probably my favorite boss of all time,

(54:26):
and we're still good friends. In fact, we work. We
get together quite often for dinner, and we play billiards,
we play pool up and like airhead and nice.

Speaker 2 (54:35):
Yeah, that's fantastic. And and I don't know whether this
is true, but IMDb claims the Steel Frontier features the
largest thing that PAM Entertainment ever exploded. Yeah, Jimney silo.

Speaker 4 (54:46):
That silo was was intense, it was crazy. But the
thing was the guy, our special effects explosion guy Don Powers.
For some reason, he decided to use an actual will plunger.
You never use a plunger, but he wanted to use
an actual plunger to.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
The whole like you see, like you see in old movies, right.

Speaker 4 (55:07):
Yeah, you know, which is attached to the wires that
go to the different bombs. Yeah, well he set it
up and we start the scene and this scene is
with well, it's where the guy runs down the side
of the silo with the rope, which is intense as
it was, but then he jumps, he gets hits the

(55:29):
ground and he starts to run and then the whole
thing blows up.

Speaker 1 (55:32):
Well, for the.

Speaker 4 (55:33):
First take, Don Powers didn't have enough whatever they use
to blow the thing up with. So you know, we
roll ca We roll how many I think four or
five or six cameras, and they're all high speeds, so
it's like roll camera, camera, camera, camera, and then he
does the plunger, and and and and and the explosion

(55:57):
goes off, and it doesn't do shit, you know, So
we got got got got that cut.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
So now he.

Speaker 4 (56:02):
Goes back and he resets up and new whatever that
stuff is called, that explodes, and well, little did we know,
he has way more than he needed. It was supposed
to knock it over. But but then when we reset up,
and we did it again actually, and the second time

(56:25):
he hits the plunger and it doesn't do anything. And
then he pulls it up and hits it again, pulls
it up, hits it again, pulls it up, hits it again,
and then it it exploded.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
And each time wasting that film that I see right
in the camera.

Speaker 4 (56:39):
But it was like nerve wracking. He was like you,
I mean, stop it kind of if it doesn't work,
it doesn't work. But and hes and it, which seemed
like unprofessional, you know, But so it was supposed to
set up so it would it would fall over, and
and and Joe Lara, well, the the stunt doubles running
away from it, but he had so much of the

(57:00):
explosive stuff in there that it basically just incinerated the
whole fucking lower half of the thing, and the top
half just.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
You know, fell rebar.

Speaker 4 (57:11):
I mean, I don't know if I should be saying this,
but rebar with cement attached to it flew over.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
The crew's head.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
Oh I'm sure one piece hit crewman's car.

Speaker 4 (57:21):
Yeah, nobody was, nobody got hurt, nobody was, you know,
but one piece of rebar with stone hit the guy's
car when it went off. There was somebody training a
couple of miles away, training a Brahma bull. Oh my goodness,
well the bull got spooked and gorged the trainer.

Speaker 2 (57:43):
He sued PM.

Speaker 4 (57:45):
Okay for that, yes, for that anyway, that's the story.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
Oh wow, okay. I mean when you do something like that,
I don't know. I mean I assume that if there
are dwellings in the area, fomz l whatever, that they
notified that that's happening. Or no.

Speaker 4 (58:01):
I don't think we thought it would be as big
as big, right formed you know, you know, I mean, yeah,
you're shooting on a street, on a city street, you
notify people, of.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
Course, right, right, right right?

Speaker 4 (58:14):
Because we were in the Kaiser steel Mill and you know,
that was a huge facility. It was like, right, probably
a mile long, mile wide, and it brings up you know, obviously.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Not only don't you have Caine Harder in the movie.

Speaker 1 (58:26):
Yes, yes, he was in there exactly.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
You obviously work with pm N stainment films. You know,
both martial arts and stunt talents like ur Camacho, Colas McKay,
Spurro's Artus who we mentioned in Broadway, Joe Murphy and
so on. Talk a little bit about not only bringing
those guys into the PM and fold, but also because
I feel like, forgive me if I'm wrong, but PM

(58:49):
Entertainment kind of was like we're an open house for
stunt people to come try out all the stuff they
want to do, and talk a little bit about sort
of the stunt men's role in PM, how much they
kind of defined the stunts, and also just sort of
being able to give them a learning ground, I guess,
or approving ground.

Speaker 3 (59:08):
Man.

Speaker 4 (59:08):
Yeah, I never worked with Spiro okay, but I worked
quite a bit with Cole McKay.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
But yeah, Cole s McKay, you definitely had. And Michael
sana As.

Speaker 4 (59:18):
Michael Sarna was the stunt coordinator. We were a little
a little disappointed with him because the bus at the end,
it had that what do they call it where it's
driving and then a big iron bark shoots out and
hits the ground and sends it flying. And it was
supposed to send it flying, you know, and do at

(59:38):
least three or four tumbles. In reality, I think it
only tumbled once or twice, but through the magic of
different angles and editing, it looks like it tumbles a
half a dozen times. I guess when it went down,
we were very we were kind of upset. We had
I mean, we had used Cole McKay a lot prior
to that, and I thought, let's try somebody new. So

(01:00:01):
we pulled Michael Sarna, but I wish we would have
stayed with again. Actually, oh, the Cole was in I
mean he was in it. He was a stuntman, a
stunt man in it. We had a Yeah, we had
a lot of stuntmen in it. Actually, yeah, I mean
stuntmen were extremely important for everything PM did, you know,
And there was it was a group of people you

(01:00:21):
know that we were used to working with and and
and you know, they they knew we had expectations, and
they would try and out do each other quite often,
especially on the piper amps and you know, trying to
get the car higher farther, you know, roll over.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
All cause at once that's yeah, I know exactly what
we're like.

Speaker 4 (01:00:42):
Yeah, the firepower coming out of the tunnel, there's yeah,
steel friends, chare. We had more explosions than any any show.
I mean, we basically built that town of New Hope.
We built that town out there, actually, all the dwellings
we created, and then we blew them all up.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
And just sitting.

Speaker 4 (01:01:00):
Where we stationed ourselves for each explosion. It was amazing
feeling that wave of heat just over us as we
did the explosion.

Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
You know that. Yeah, that was very very interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
Okay, And now we talked to the writer and co
director of the film, Jacobson Hart. He also had a
small part of that as well. But in addition to writing,
and I think this sort of goes for a lot
of people at PM because I think everyone sort of
wore lots of hats. You also worked as sort of
an assistant director and co director on Lion Strike, which
is almost entirely wall to wall action and Steel Frontier

(01:01:38):
that I really want to dive into. How is that
experience compared to writing and did it sort of change
how you approached storytelling?

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
Well, the second unit directing, I did for Lions Strike
was sort of testing the waters to see how I
did on set and how I constructed myself with all
the stunt performers. And Don the Dragon was on that film,
the Star of Lions Strike, and Paul and I directed

(01:02:09):
the scene on the rooftop with the helicopter and I
think there's a shootout and the stairwell. So we filmed
a lot of the action for Lions Strike, and that
was sort of jumping into the deep end and just
there wasn't a lot of prep and we just kind
of went for it. So as far as storytelling, I

(01:02:30):
don't think that I just took everything I had up
to that point with me in the Steel Frontier. As
far as storytelling and directing.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
Action, Yeah, Steel Frontier feels like and whenever I talk
about it, it always sounds like I'm criticizing the other movies.
I'm not. It feels like everyone. It feels like you
all got together and went, let's just spend just a
little more time on this one and get as much

(01:03:00):
of it perfect as possible. Because from the from the
slightly kind of slower, obviously spaghetti western inspired, but still
very well presented, very well shot, you know, beautifully scored
with that great kind of echoe vocal score that you
have going on to the way that the scene is

(01:03:21):
set up and everything. When I watch Theel Frontier, I
just feel like there is a care in it and
it allows certain things to breathe. I think about the
scene where Joe Larra is by the side of the
road playing the harmonica and the guy shows up in
the truck and the hole you know, it's hotter than
the Devil's piss out here. That sequence, I think about that,

(01:03:43):
just the way that breathes before jumping into the action sequence,
and then the lead into the action sequence has a
line where he says, he says, are you running, boy?
And he says should I be? And then it leads
into the action sequence. Similarly, when Brian James looks over
it into the and says, you know, death rides alone,
and then it cuts to Joe Lara coming up over

(01:04:06):
the hill. It just it just feels like there was
an extra bit of care on that movie. Please talk
about making it, Please talk about all the conversations that
we had in the lead up to it. It's one
of my favorites. I absolutely Dora and I will be
singing its praises for the rest of time. But am
I close to Was there a consensus effort to put

(01:04:28):
more energy into this one a little bit?

Speaker 3 (01:04:30):
I think so. I think it kind of snowballed in
pre production. Originally it was going to be something very
low budget, and I was assigned to direct it, and
that came out of the blue. I was just for me.
It was a Monday morning and I went into Joseph's
office as I had done many times before, and we
were going to talk about the next film, and he said,

(01:04:50):
we're going to do something like The Road Warrior, something
like Mad Max. And I said okay, and I said
who's going to direct it? And he said that's the kicker.
You are, you and Paul, And that took me by surprise.
I was very happy just writing scripts for him. So
I was a little intimidated at first that the prospect
of directing it, but I didn't back down, and I

(01:05:11):
wrote the script. Paul and I talked a little bit
where we had a weekend when we went to He
had a cabin and Blake Arrowhead and we went up
there for a weekend and hashed down a story, watched
a lot of movies. Yeah, the spaghetti westerns were an influence,
and that was kind of my idea I was trying
to I knew that it was going to be a

(01:05:31):
Road Warrior rip off, and I guess to add some
kind of something new to it. I decided, I was
watching this full of dollars, and I said, let's make
it like a spaghetti western. Also, you know, let's do
a western in the future. And World Warrior is kind
of like a Western already, but what we embraced the
spaghetti western esthetic and the vibe of a spaghetti western,

(01:05:58):
the pacing. So that kind of gave me a direction
to go in. And I wrote the script and I
spent probably three weeks writing the script after my weekend
in Lake Arrowhead with Paul, and they liked the script
so much they decided to put more money into it.
And that's when Joe and Rick, and that's when Rick

(01:06:20):
decided that he was gonna be the DP, which is
an unusual situation for a director to be working for
your DP. Usually the director tells the DP what's going
to happen. In that case, it was sometimes it was

(01:06:43):
the director asking the the DP if we could do that. Yeah,
but it was a good collaboration. I loved it. I
loved working with Paul and I loved working with Rick
and the whole week and they spent They put more
money into the film that they'd put into prior films,
and they also spent more time. Most a lot of

(01:07:04):
times they would shoot a movie in a week and
a half maybe two weeks, and we had four weeks
on that film. Three weeks we were at they we
found a location called the Kaiser's Steel Mill out in Fontana, California,

(01:07:24):
kind of a desert area, and it was a closed
down steel mill they back in the they used to
build ships there for The Wolf of World War two,
and it was a massive location and you'd drive into
it and it just looked like a post apocalyptic war zone.
And other films had shot there before us, including Terminator two.

(01:07:46):
And there's a scene in Steel Frontier that takes place
in a tunnel where everyone's hiding in the tunnel because
the bad guys are coming, and that tunnel is the
same tunnel that Terminated two shot. They're opening scene end
with John Connor and yeah, I made sure when I
said that, they said they were giving us a tour

(01:08:08):
at the beginning, and you know, when we were looking
at the location, the little Termino two shot here and
I said, well, we're gonna shoot them here too. Yeah,
I mean, sure to shoot a sequence in that tunnel,
because it was the same tunnel with James Cameron had
shot his film.

Speaker 2 (01:08:22):
It feels like you were really getting to live out
you know a lot of your film fan fantasies to sense.

Speaker 1 (01:08:28):
A little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:08:29):
Yeah, certainly. There was also at that location there was
thousands of tires, massive mountains of car tires, six or
seven mountains thirty feet high of car tires. I don't
know why they were there, but they were there. And

(01:08:51):
originally the town had its own oil well. And as
soon as I saw the tires, they got to use
these tires and let's not have them drilling for oil.
Let's have them convert these tires into fuel, which is
actually possible. There was I read it. I'd read about
that in a magazine. Yeah, converting old tires into fuel.
And I said, let's do that. And so that's how

(01:09:13):
we incorporated those those tires, those piles. And it's a
nice visual, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
A fantastic visual, and it's also again it's that thing
of you know, the luck that you show up at
a location that has this incredible thing visual idea, but
also something that when you applied it to the story,
you know, moved it away from being just a straight,

(01:09:41):
you know what, Road Warrior kind of film and gave
it its own thing, gave it its own idea that you
haven't seen in other movies. You haven't seen tires being
sort of a form of energy, and therefore because it's
a post apocalyptic kind of a form of current, you know,
and so having that in that kind of it changes

(01:10:05):
it and elevates it and adds it. And well, yes, okay,
you've got a few cars that have you know, metal
plates put on them, and they will look a bit
beat up and post apocalyptic and stuff like that. So
obviously people go, Okay, there's a little mad Max in here.
The whole movie doesn't play out like that. The whole
movie plays out as yeah, sure, I know the influences here,
but this is its own thing.

Speaker 3 (01:10:27):
I had such a love for The Road Warrior and
The Terminator. I didn't want to rip the films off.
I wanted I knew that they were what they like,
I said, I knew that what they were designed to
be from the beginning. They were designed to sell to
the same markets that that bought the room, the same

(01:10:50):
people that like those films, and so, like I said,
you can't really escape that. But I did what I
could to give the film original thing, something original, something unique. Yeah,
that was important to me.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
And I think the again, like I said before, I
think the lines some of the more enigmatic or most
poetic lines that in that you're used to seeing in
something like a spaghetti western or even sort of in
those early nineties, you know, Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith

(01:11:29):
films that were coming out at the time as well.
Some of those more enigmatic, kind of poetic lines are
really given their do in Steel Frontier. You know, it's
not a it's not just a line of dialogue that's
kind of shouted at another character as they run from
kind of one action scene to another. It's you, really
that vibe, whatever that vibe was that you all agreed on.

(01:11:51):
I'm telling you, you you hit it, and then some
like you you you succeeded, and and then some it's
some of the lines in that that's actually the Hall
of the Devil's pisscene. I absolutely loved that scene and
anything that Brian James does. I'm a big fan of
Brian James.

Speaker 3 (01:12:08):
Yeah, yeah, that was that was a great experience working
with him. He was a total professional and very very
easy to get along with, and as soon as he
got to the set, it's like, Okay, what's what's going on,
let's let's do it. He was never averse to anything.
He was very gung ho and and he really chewed

(01:12:29):
up that dialogue. He really brought that but that death
rides alone line, he.

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
Really brought that to life. Yeah, that's so good.

Speaker 3 (01:12:36):
That it's a great moment.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
It's like Jack Jack Scalia saying, you know, always die
with your eyes open. It's got that kind of poetic,
lyrical ring to it that it's it's just a great
it's just a great thing to say. My understanding from
Paul is the only issue one set, I guess or
the only grumpy actor who didn't necessarily bring that a
game was was bose Fens And he was the only
one that kind of Paul was telling me he was

(01:13:00):
sort of a little begrudging about being there. I think,
is that right or is that just as.

Speaker 3 (01:13:05):
Both Vinson was a little that film maybe was a
little below his pay grade. He was, and I don't
necessarily mean that financially. I mean both Vinson is a
professional and he had been around for a long time
and he had I mean, he was making great films
back in the seventies. I mean he was in the

(01:13:27):
great Waldo Pepper and both Venson is a terrific actor,
and he brought a professionalism that we didn't necessarily match.
I think that he was very patient with the production.
I remember at one point there's a scene where there
candles on the wall and he was standing next to

(01:13:49):
a wall in one of the candles fell and fell
on him, and so hot wax fell on him and
we all saw it, and Paul and I I know,
I just stiffened up. Oh no, because because Boa was
not a guy who was afraid to tell you what
was on his mind. And he always had ideas. And
one of my regrets is not listening to more of

(01:14:11):
his ideas, because he had some pretty cool ideas, but
we were in motion and you can't all We tried
to incorporate some of them, yeah, but you can't incorporate
all of them. And he brought ideas all the time,
and I liked bo a lot, but he was very
He wasn't as patient as Brian James, which is the.

Speaker 2 (01:14:36):
Only reason that's a little odd to me. Is yes,
I know his history from the seventies and before and
some of the movies that he made. He obviously also
took over from Joe Don Baker in the role of
Buford Poso for The Walking Toll, both the movies and
the TV series and other things like that. But it's
you know, he had been making, you know, middle to

(01:14:56):
low budget movies really throughout the eighties. He does horror
films and post apocalyptic movies and action films, all with
either budgets comparable or even lower. I mean, he works
with Fred the Hammer Williamson, who I know never spent
over one hundred thousand dollars on a movie. We're all
like fifty sixty thousand dollar movies. He worked with him

(01:15:19):
a few times in Delta Force, Commando and Three Days
to a Kill. He worked on movies like Curse to
the Bite and Primal Rage, and you know, he had
done his fair share of b movies. It's just odd
to me that he would get to steal Frontier, which
I think just based on watching it probably had at
least a better production value and set than some of

(01:15:40):
those others. But maybe that was just his his mood
and style. I guess. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:15:45):
Well, I say he was made that pay rate, that
pay grade comet. It's more like what I mean to
say is he had done several A pictures. He had
done several beat big Hollywood studio prediction productions, so he
team onto our set. It was I think it was
a little more low budget than I don't know, maybe

(01:16:06):
he had done tons of low budget films. I wasn't
too familiar with it with his catalog at the time.
I know, after Steel Frontier, the next thing he did
was Speed Too.

Speaker 2 (01:16:18):
Yeah, it's weird he jumps back into like a big
Hollywood picture and Speed Too. Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 3 (01:16:24):
But he said, you know, I say he I when
I when I mentioned his his patients, he when the
CANDLEWHACKX fell on him, I thought he was going to
go through the roof, but actually he was very cool.
So I think that was like that was the third
week of production, and so I think he had finally
sort of settled into what he was involved with. But

(01:16:49):
I remember, I remember we decided to cut his last scene,
and Paul and I we had to tell him. One
of us had to tell him, and we didn't want
to because we were kind of scary. Not physically, but
he's an imposing guy. He's probably six five, I don't know.
He's a big guy and uh, very serious and uh.

(01:17:10):
We flipped the coin to see who would go and
tell him and I so I remember while he would
sit in the hotel lobby and he kind of held
court in the lobby. He would sit there for a
long time, and you know, various days, and I remember
walking down the hallway toward him and I was like

(01:17:31):
my heart was beating because I'm like, I don't have
to cut his scene. I don't know if he's gonna
like this. And I sat down. Good morning, bow and
he said, good morning. Are you good? I said, well,
we talked a little bit and I said, but we
decided that we need to cut the last scene.

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
He says, oh, were.

Speaker 3 (01:17:49):
He was probably happy to get out of there soon.

Speaker 2 (01:17:51):
He got his He got his fight in the desert
though with the.

Speaker 3 (01:17:54):
Well, yeah, he choreographed that fight scene. Yeah, it was
I was really impressed with that. He he choreographed that
fight scene.

Speaker 2 (01:18:01):
Because he got his moment and his moment, you know
what I mean. And that's what I love about these guys.

Speaker 3 (01:18:06):
Yeah, it was that had a good cast too. It
was great, you know, Brian, him and Jie Laura. And
that was the second film that I worked on with
Stacy Foster, who was this terrific actress. She was also
a CyberTracker and I after she did Cyber Tractor, I
thought she was so good. I suggested that we cast
her in Steel Friends Here and and that went overwhell.

(01:18:28):
I really liked working with her. She's very talented. And
then we had Kane Hotter yea and King Kane came
in at the last minute because a stuntman was going
to play his role and then the stuntman broke his
leg and so they cast Kane Hotter to come in.
And Kane who played Jason in front of the thirteenth

(01:18:50):
several of those things. You may notice he's wearing a
beret with Jason image on the barrow. Yes, And that
was Kane's idea. He said, can I wear this this
Jason and patch on my hat? And I said, yeah, sure,
why not. He was fun to work with. He wanted

(01:19:11):
more dialogue, but I think he was upset that we
didn't give him more dialogue. I said, well, he's kind
of a strong, silent type. You know, he's the assassin
of the bunch. He's the one who man's the fifty
cal and cuts down half the village.

Speaker 2 (01:19:24):
Yeah, he has. He has a scene that when I
first watched the movie, you know, I mean, obviously I'm
used to I've watched all sorts of grindhouse movies and
exploitation movies. I'm used to violence and things and action sequences.
But I hadn't seen a PM Entertainment movie before where
a thug kicked a woman between the legs and then

(01:19:45):
broke her back over his shoulder. I was a little
bit like, oh, PM Entertainment goes a little grindhouse in
this movie. Okay, that's fine, I love it. I'm digging it.
But yeah, it was I remember when.

Speaker 3 (01:19:58):
We shot that. That was Geane. He choreographed that little piece.
He says, it's never been done before in a movie,
and he said, Okay, let's do it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
Yeah, no, it's it's it's in.

Speaker 3 (01:20:09):
It.

Speaker 2 (01:20:09):
Yeah. It's interesting because it's a movie that I think,
and I think all the better for it. I think
that it will live longer because of this. But I
think we were talking about this with my friend Matt
and he said, what's nice about Steel Frontier is it
dances up to the line of exploitation just enough. It

(01:20:29):
never other movies like it always go, especially the Italian
ones or the Filipino ones or whatever, always push it
more into the grindhouse, especially when it comes to abuse
against women, especially sexual abuse. There's always a scene in
one of those movies where you kind of think, especially
as you get older, you start to have the less

(01:20:53):
sort of childish interests of true exploitation. When you're you know,
in your twenties or whatever. You start to get older
and you love action movie, a new love exploitation, but
you don't want it always to go to a point
where it becomes uncomfortable, and Steel Frontine never does. It
gets it goes up to that line a few times,
which is perfect because all you need that is to

(01:21:13):
establish that these guys mean business, that the terrible people,
that when they get killed or when they get beaten up,
it's absolutely fine. But there are some decisions in the
movie that you never crossed that line. And I think
that because of that it becomes it becomes a movie
that you can watch over and over again, because as
aggressive and terrible as the death rids are, that you're

(01:21:36):
never it's never rammed down your face, especially the sexual violence.

Speaker 3 (01:21:41):
Yeah, we tried to leave I tried. My sensibilities has
usually been to try to leave as much of that
up to the imagination as I can. Yeah, that's just
my own personal sensibilities. In those films PM, they were
an exploitition exploitation company in that they but they didn't
necessary serily exploit sex and blood. They exploited explosions and carson, right.

Speaker 2 (01:22:05):
Which is fine because that feels fantastical enough that you
can while you love it and it excites you and
it draws you into the movie. You don't believe that
it's going to happen when you walk out your door,
you know what. Necessarily, Similarly, with Steel Frontier, I think
the decision when they you know, one of the hardest
scenes in the movie to some extent, if you're emotionally

(01:22:26):
invested in it, which I apparently was when I watched it,
is when they gunned down all the able men in
town without any kind of remorse. But you make the
decision or you did in the editing suite either way,
not to show it. Instead, you show the reaction of
the women and the older people in town to what
was a horrible massacre, and I think that is a

(01:22:48):
lot more affecting. It hits you a lot harder because
your brain paints a picture. Oh my goodness, what would
it feel like if I saw my loved ones gunned
down in such a barbaric way? Then if you showed
it in some kind of you know, Sam Peckinpah blood
explosion or something.

Speaker 3 (01:23:06):
Well, that's how I felt at the time. Even when
I wrote it. We didn't film the the guys getting
r We decided not to film it, so it wasn't
It was a choice made in the writing and that
I'm okay with blood. I have no problem with blood,
but I think it should be it should be sort

(01:23:27):
of it. It's I don't like shooting fish in a barrel.
I mean, if it can be implied, imply it there
and then when you show the blood later in some
other scene, it hopefully will have more impact. Yeah, you know,
I mean, we could have shown guys getting shot, but
you know, my thinking was, what for you know, what's happening.

(01:23:51):
You want to show people getting shot when it's a surprise,
or when it's when it's a maybe a character that
you care about, that you've gotten to know, so it
has more of an impact, more of a personal impact.
But when it's just non character's background performers and it's
designed to show how bad the villains are. I didn't

(01:24:14):
see any reason to show the bloodshed. I didn't. I
thought it would just be gratuitous and it wouldn't have
any impact. So I appreciate you pointing that out. Yeah,
because there was a choice, and you know, when you
make choices like that, you don't necessarily know if it's
the right choice. You know, you just kind of feel

(01:24:35):
it out and go with your instincts. Well, I think
we could have shot a bunch of squids, but we didn't.

Speaker 2 (01:24:40):
And well, it also comes off the back of the
you know, that huge montage of violence that's juxtaposed with
Brian James getting shaved, you know, getting a shave that
has a lot of violence in it, And I think
that it was also not necessary to add to that,
Like I think it you already know what they're capable of,

(01:25:02):
and then they're going to do ultimately the unthinkable and
that they do that, but it's off screen. I just
think it's very affecting. Well, yeah, as I say, it's
Steel Frontier, so it's a triumph and a great achievement.
And lastly, here's our fantastic conversation with Chicken Boy himself,

(01:25:22):
Brian Hakabah. Brian, thanks ever so much for being on
the show. But Steel Frontier was a PM movie that
I only recently discovered, and since I have done, I've
been completely obsessed with.

Speaker 5 (01:25:34):
As you should, of course, masterpiece.

Speaker 2 (01:25:38):
And the thing is is that And I got a
lovely comment. The other day. I was standing online to
meet Joe Bob Briggs and I was chatting, as you
do when you're at those kind of calm things and
stuff people online, and we all got to chatting because
we're all very similar movie nerds, and I was chatting
away about PM Entertainment and a chat came out of

(01:25:59):
the having seen Joe Bob and was I heard you
talking about PM Entertainment earlier? Are you the PM Entertainment podcast?
I'm like, I am, Yeah, Well, I just downloaded your
second episode to listen on the drive up here. I
really love the way and This is why I brought
it up, because I really love the way that you're
not snarky about the movie. So many people are snocky

(01:26:20):
about them or watch them ironically or whatever. And he said,
you genuinely seem to love them. So when I call
Steal Frontier masterpiece, I mean it's a masterpiece. I genuinely
love it.

Speaker 6 (01:26:31):
Yeah, heam was sort of the low budget action stuff
and sci fi and they man, they knew how to
blow stuff up, like and still Frontier is like the
epitome of blowing stuff up to perfection, like the school
bus and that tower. We had like a local news
thing come out to watch.

Speaker 5 (01:26:49):
Us drop that tower that you saw.

Speaker 6 (01:26:51):
And I don't know if you know, if I'm sure
you've talked to the other fellas, but the tower was
actually supposed to fall over like this, Yes, but it
dropped straight down, and it still looked like a really
boss like.

Speaker 5 (01:27:04):
Like, oh I just drop Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:27:06):
And it was startling too, like everyone was like everyone's
on rooftops and you know, they were allay, all one
hundred yards away or whatever they told us, like was
the safety distance.

Speaker 5 (01:27:15):
Yeah, and we all just sort of waited.

Speaker 6 (01:27:16):
We you know, we didn't even hear air comes, like
at some point we just started talking and we just
boom and we had to like turn our heads to
see it fall because there was no bree too, or
it was and it was, but there was so far
away we couldn't hear the countdown.

Speaker 2 (01:27:30):
Right, and poor Joe Lara is having to run away
from the damn thing, Like I can't even imagine what
he was going through.

Speaker 5 (01:27:37):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2 (01:27:37):
Yeah. Yeah, especially with modern eye, when you go back
and watch something that you know for one hundred percent
was done for real in camera by actual humans, there
is such an excitement there and such a sort of
a not to use a lofty term, but like a
frizon that you don't get watching any CG. I don't

(01:27:58):
care how good the CGIs, so true, it's you know.
And even that shot at the beginning when you're all
riding along and they've sort of done the Matte painting
of the kind of destroyed world yeah behind you, even
that even some people might look at that and be like, oh,
that's a cheesy effect. I love that.

Speaker 5 (01:28:17):
Oh I love it too.

Speaker 6 (01:28:19):
Can I tell you when we when we we actually
have a screening, which I loved it was like, I've
never been part of a screening before. And it was
also like a gas just to see my name up
on there. And it was with Jim Cody Williams and
Robert O'Reilly and I love both of those guys. So
the fact that the three of us are on you know,
we have the tag together, just trails me beyond belief

(01:28:39):
because I'm almost like a Star Trek fan. So when
Robert o'rallley was there, I'm like, oh, freaking gal Ron.

Speaker 5 (01:28:44):
Is in this movie.

Speaker 2 (01:28:45):
Yes, like I was.

Speaker 5 (01:28:46):
This was just like the best thing ever.

Speaker 6 (01:28:48):
And the stuntman Jeff and Mata right, who did all
of Joe Learra's stunts, you know, did the repel And
I met him, you know, by one of the the trucks,
just talking to him. I'm like, you know, just picking
his brain about doing stunts. And he told me he
was the stuntman for Brandon Lee and The Crow right
and then and he told me his story about Brandon,

(01:29:10):
which was super heartfelt. And the pants he was wearing.
He goes and just so you know, the pants I'm wearing,
these are the pants I wore in The Crow. I
was like, dude, like everything about this movie. He just
had so much karma. Yes, and like freaking kine heart,
like Jason Voorhes is in this movie.

Speaker 2 (01:29:26):
Yeah, I mean you have some app I mean the
character actors and sort of B movie heavyweights that are
in this movie, Brian James, bo Spence and Caine Herder,
Jim Curty, Williams, this cast list, you know. And I
think this is what's amazing that's still Frontier is that
obviously it's it's PM Entertainment shot at doing a post

(01:29:47):
apocalyptic western road movie kind of thing. So it has
all the genre tropes that you would hope and want
and expect from that kind of film. But not only
that they do it, not only that they do each
of those genre tropes really really well, to the point
where you kind of go, wow, this is as much
as I love PM, and I always sound like I'm

(01:30:09):
slagging off the rest of PM when I say this,
but it feels like PM has really stepped up their
game with Steel Frontier. It feels like they took just
that extra half an hour or an hour or two
hours to make each scene just a little extra you know,
You've got Rick Peppen behind the camera, you know, giving
it all that he's got as a cinematographer. He was great.

Speaker 5 (01:30:30):
He was great.

Speaker 2 (01:30:31):
Yeah, You've got obviously Paul Volk, who'd worked on one
hundred PM movies at that point. You've got jameson Hart,
one of their best writers. But then, you know, for
a post apocalyptic western movie for fans, you want Brian James,
you want Bose Fens, and you want these guys Caine
Hard or whatever. You want these guys in there. And

(01:30:52):
the fact that PM went out to those guys and
got if you're a straight to video fan, they got
to me like the al you know, and I love
that about them.

Speaker 6 (01:31:03):
Yeah, And you could feel it on the set, you
know when I was If you want, I can talk
to you about the casting part, if you want.

Speaker 2 (01:31:09):
Yes, please, I mean my first question is obviously, how
did you come to work for PM, and why, especially
Steel front End.

Speaker 6 (01:31:16):
Okay, I have a really great story how I got
this part. I don't even think I've told either of
the directors, Paul or Jacobson.

Speaker 2 (01:31:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:31:24):
So I was there and my manager got me this
audition for Steel Frontier. You know, chicken Boy, right, and
just on paper, I'm.

Speaker 5 (01:31:31):
Like, what is this character? What is it?

Speaker 6 (01:31:32):
Like, other than the absurd name and the fact that
it slightly repeats kind of everything everybody else says.

Speaker 5 (01:31:40):
I didn't really there wasn't.

Speaker 6 (01:31:41):
A lot to go on, right, So I get there
and I'm sitting next to the door to go in,
not intentionally, just that was the seat I was in,
and I could hear them.

Speaker 5 (01:31:52):
There was an actor in there, and they were giving
him all this direction like he wasn't there. He just
wasn't like he was kind of nerdy looking sort of like.

Speaker 6 (01:32:01):
Me, Like it was strange, but but he wasn't dialing
it in what they want. But I was listening to
everything they told him to go out and work on.

Speaker 5 (01:32:10):
So when I went in.

Speaker 6 (01:32:12):
I hate to say, but when I went in, I
knew everything they were looking for, which is helpful. I mean,
sometimes they're supposed to tell you that anyway, Like when
you go in, you go, okay, how would you like,
you know, is do you see this certain way?

Speaker 5 (01:32:23):
Would I like to do another take?

Speaker 6 (01:32:24):
Like because I would have just done my first instinct
and then asked them would you like to see it
another way? And if you're really far off they said no,
they'll say stuff like no, no, thank you. But if
if you're close, then they do what that they do
with that guys. They give him tips and send him out.
But dude, so when they go, okay, you ready, I
go yes. And then I looked around my space. I go,

(01:32:45):
it's it okay if I have this whole space.

Speaker 5 (01:32:47):
To work in.

Speaker 6 (01:32:47):
And I'm telling you, there was like like a living
room kind of thing, and they go. They would sort
of look at each other, and I didn't know these
were the writers and directors because I was just there
to meet Adriana Michelle. So this was already like the
callback situation like that I was in. So I was
after the fact, and so I just you know, started
moving the head. You know, it's a chicken, right, So
I'm just darting my head around, you know, and you know,

(01:33:11):
just twitching like a chicken. And then and then of
course I would just got a little bit of psycho
in the eyes and and just was very like, I
don't know, you know, just I heard what they wanted
and I dialed it all in and then you know,
when it was over, I was just like I felt
really good.

Speaker 5 (01:33:29):
And then I went home. And then two weeks went by,
I'm like, I don't believe this. I don't.

Speaker 6 (01:33:33):
I killed it in there, like I know, like to
not even get a call back or something. I was
just like, I'm like, I don't know how this town works.
Then I mean I thought, oh it els, I did
this thing with my hair. I said, I just took
my hair and I just messed it up like this,
and my hair was literally sticking out like you see
it in the movie.

Speaker 5 (01:33:51):
Or more so.

Speaker 6 (01:33:52):
But I thought, I have to go for it. I
have to do everything physically. So hair was out to
hear the twitching. And then two weeks later, my manager
calls and she goes, hey, it's me Melissa.

Speaker 5 (01:34:03):
I'm like, oh, hey, so what's up.

Speaker 6 (01:34:05):
She goes, oh, yeah, so you know that movie you
audition four different to him like, oh, you're kidding. I mean,
she was totally playing me. She made it sound like
I didn't get it. She just yeah, so you got
the part, like she did it like that, And I
was like, what, Yeah, it was so I loved how
like she just toyed with me a little bit, and
then it was just heaven from there. And I did

(01:34:28):
you know this great little thing I learned that Adriana
Michelle she like pies and so you try to say
thank you in a very special way. So, dude, I
went straight found out what her favorite pie was. I
went and bought that pie, and I drove that pie
two PM Entertainment and just knocked on the door. You know,
stuff you can't even do nowadays. You can't even go,
like to a casting pie. You got to have like
credentials and your name on a list and this, you know.

(01:34:50):
I just went there and knocked on the door, brought in,
gave her a pie, and she was so happy, and
she's like, what is this for.

Speaker 5 (01:34:55):
I'm like, I'm thanking you for bringing me in. She goes,
Oh my.

Speaker 6 (01:35:00):
God, no one has ever done this for me. I'm like, really,
there are a lot of fankless actors.

Speaker 2 (01:35:06):
Then, right, exactly, good for you appreciated. No, that's fantastic.
What a great story of how you Yeah, it's it's
interesting your character chicken man. As I said, PM and
Salmon certainly knew that genre tropes when they were making
straight to video versions of blockbusters and things like that,
But that sort of comic relief, Waido's sidekick often a

(01:35:28):
kind of a grotesque character. It very much appears in
osplitation films and some American post apocalyptic movies. But but
weirdly for most of the other companies that tried to
kind of hate those movies or do their own versions
of them. And I'm thinking particularly of the huge rash
of Italian films that came out after Mad Max, that

(01:35:49):
kind of they never included that kind of character, and.

Speaker 6 (01:35:52):
It was and I knew that's what I was being
cast for, right, And I wonder there is no other.

Speaker 5 (01:35:58):
Comedy in the in the entire film.

Speaker 2 (01:36:00):
Right exactly. And did you have that frame of reference
as a movie fan, did you have that frame of
reference that you'd seen some of those sort of not
just the Mad Max films, with some of those seventies
trending movies that often have those characters, like Razor Back,
for example, has two characters who drive around in trucks
and they're not chicken mem but they have like the

(01:36:20):
punk you know, uh oh why and shirts on and
the suspenders and the spiky hair and the you know,
and they talk in like wiry, crazy voices. They're sort
of throughout the ousploitation genre. And I wondered if you
had a frame of reference before you sort of crafted
the character yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:36:36):
I mean I did know that going into it.

Speaker 6 (01:36:39):
That's who I was put into this film to be right, Yeah,
and so piggybacking off of characters like that, I just thought, okay, oh,
by the way, so this is also what helped the
character come around. So a lot of people they kind
of just had their wardrobe. I'm not sure how they
did it actually, because I wasn't with their wardrobe. But
for me, the wardrobe she asked me to come in.

(01:37:01):
She goes, all right, I want you to come into
our wardrobe department and we're going to create this costume.

Speaker 5 (01:37:07):
I was like, oh my god, this.

Speaker 6 (01:37:10):
So really I just got to look at anything that
was absurd and point to it, like like that weird
like Indian bone.

Speaker 5 (01:37:17):
Plate that I'm wearing. I just saw that sitting on
the ground.

Speaker 6 (01:37:20):
I'm like, I want to wear that, and then I
want to wear the only thing that they had pre
made for me was that gorgeous jacket.

Speaker 5 (01:37:25):
With the feathers.

Speaker 2 (01:37:26):
Yes, like like just the plumage.

Speaker 5 (01:37:28):
Was just like I just put it on. I'm like, oh,
the dude, I look. I was like, there was no
one else that.

Speaker 6 (01:37:36):
Could have played this part. That's what I say, right,
I go, can I have this costume? And they go, well,
not right now, because we might need to do reshoots.
I'm like, but they didn't tell me I was going
to be part of reshoots. I'm like, well, who on
earth would you get to wear it if it's not me?

Speaker 1 (01:37:52):
Right?

Speaker 6 (01:37:52):
But I understand that, so in cases reshoots, you know,
don't take it home yet. But because then there were
no reshoots because we nailed it, I never got to
see them again and see the costume again.

Speaker 5 (01:38:05):
So who knows where it is?

Speaker 2 (01:38:06):
But but it should be in the Smithsonian. It should
be right if the world was the way it should be.

Speaker 6 (01:38:13):
Yeah, well it's funny because even every little detail. So
as we're putting it together, I realized one thing like
about this character, and this is something that came around
just doing this costume is I'm like, why am I
wearing this stuff?

Speaker 5 (01:38:26):
What is all this stuff on me?

Speaker 3 (01:38:28):
Like?

Speaker 6 (01:38:28):
None of it makes sense? And so I knew according
to one of the scenes, as you know with Bacchus,
as he as he's about to like do bad things
to Stacy Foster's character, you want to watch boy, you
want to watch watch me roby your mama's teeth right. Uh.
My backstory to that was we do this all the time, right,
And the other backstory is that Bacchus saved me from something.

(01:38:52):
He saved me from dying, so that's why I am
beholden to him completely. And then aside from that, all
the things on me are pieces of stuff people wore.
So the glasses is from one girl. The bracelets and
the rings I was wearing, and the gloves were all
from other people. And I even took the glasses and

(01:39:12):
I popped one of the lenses out so that if
you look, one of the lenses is always missing because
you know, they got in a fight or he shot
her eye out or something.

Speaker 5 (01:39:21):
So I just wanted it as it like just a
crazy in fact, in the scene as we're driving and
he hits.

Speaker 6 (01:39:29):
Me and I go flying into the back seat, you know,
I take I do my own still, thank you very much.
If you look carefully, one of the things comes flying
off my wrist because it wasn't and it's gone forever.

Speaker 2 (01:39:39):
I don't know where it is.

Speaker 5 (01:39:40):
It's in that desert bed somewhere.

Speaker 2 (01:39:42):
Was there any other or any different inspiration you drew
from anyone else or any other kind of films that
you were a fan of for your performance, or were
you much more interested in, like what you seem to
be saying, which is creating the character's backstory, using the
costume to inform a lot of it, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:40:01):
Yeah, for me, that's exactly how this whole character came about,
because it was so strange on page what to do
with it, And certainly I love these type of movies.
I've always been a fan of, you know, the dystopian
futures or just sci fi in general and in action.

Speaker 5 (01:40:13):
I just this type of movie is in my wheelhouse.

Speaker 6 (01:40:16):
So I didn't base anything I did on any other
character I'd ever seen. It was all based on what
I heard them tell the other actor, which is, you know,
that's sort of like, you know, he's he's sort of
traumatized a little bit. He's kind of twitchy and like
all this stuff, and so I'm like, okay, So I
had to figure out why he's that way, what put
him there, and then of course walking me into the

(01:40:38):
wardrobe department creating that like, it was all just sort
of manifesting itself, like as we were getting closer to shooting,
every little step just created another little piece to the character.
So when we rolled for that first day, I was
just like I was in character.

Speaker 5 (01:40:52):
I was ready to go.

Speaker 6 (01:40:53):
It's this nut job bouncing around on tires in the
background while Jim Cody's like hitting on a girl, and
I'm like.

Speaker 2 (01:41:00):
Right, and there seems to be you know, the as
you said, the death writers, death writers. There's a ton
of character actors that we've been talking about, and Caine
Harder who's sort of a stuntman actor, and so on
and so forth. Was there a camaraderie. Did you guys
spend time either before the film or you know, during
the film when you weren't on set shooting, kind of

(01:41:22):
formulating your group and getting to know each other and
all that kind of stuff, or was it just when
the cameras.

Speaker 6 (01:41:27):
Were roll Well, it's yes to some of that, because
I wasn't in the scene with a lot of like
Green Street, you know, Alfonso who was in the movie
as well.

Speaker 5 (01:41:37):
Yeah, some of those guys.

Speaker 6 (01:41:38):
I was just in those like the bar scene, the
bar scene, by the way, and like I love Jim
Cody because Jim Cody will just make up any dialogue.

Speaker 5 (01:41:48):
He was not beholding to that script. Sorry to Jim
who like wrote the script.

Speaker 6 (01:41:53):
But Jim Cody would just go He would say whatever
he wanted. I think the whole thing, like the girl
reference to Chicken Boy.

Speaker 5 (01:42:00):
They said something like what you bring her here for?

Speaker 6 (01:42:02):
And and you know, Stacy was there and he points
to me and goes her and I'm like what, I look.

Speaker 5 (01:42:08):
Like, what do you mean mean? He goes no her.

Speaker 6 (01:42:10):
I was like, like, all that was just improvised. None
of that was on paper. So but Jim Cody, because
I spent so much time with him, well, he and
I became friends after the movie. I'm an editor by trade,
so I did tons of actors demos, so for the
longest time, Jim Cody would come to me and I'd
work on his demos, you know, for.

Speaker 5 (01:42:30):
Whatever he needed them.

Speaker 6 (01:42:31):
So yeah, and he and I are still friends today.
So yeah, and then Stacy as well. Like Stacy, I
don't talk to her much, but because we ran a
few scenes with her as well, we would just bond
during you know, when we weren't rolling the camera. So
so the more people had in the scenes with me,
the closer I bonded with him. And then even Robert O'Reilly,

(01:42:52):
I would see him at like sci fi convention because
you know, still sci fi nerds. I go to my
sci fi conventions, and he recognized it every time. He's
like there he is, and yeah, so yeah, it's good.
It was a great bunch of people like it was.
I couldn't have asked for about this is my first
official film, and I couldn't have asked for a better

(01:43:14):
like a better one.

Speaker 2 (01:43:16):
Yeah, of course. And you had pull Vaulty jameson hot,
you had Rick on set shooting it. Obviously, those are
three guys who probably all have their own like view
of how stuff should be done. They were all obviously
working close together as sort of write a director, director
and cinematographer. Talk a little bit about what that dynamic

(01:43:37):
was like or what you kind of observed about that
collaboration between the three of them.

Speaker 6 (01:43:43):
So I had more contact with the two directors, right,
And so it was just kind of fun to watch
because they were also in the film as well as
you know, like yes, yes, side characters because they wouldn't
have fun. They could tell this was gonna be a
fun one to do. And I was also very fascinating
with the process. So I went to you know, see

(01:44:05):
Paul do stuff, Like I went and asked him could
I have a movie poster? Because I was so excited
my name is on the poster, Like how is my
name on the poster?

Speaker 5 (01:44:13):
I mean there are.

Speaker 6 (01:44:14):
Guys like like like Robert O'Reilly is not on the poster,
like he had much way more credits than me. So
it's just all It's all about just performance and how
you conduct yourself. And I was always so just thankful
at every step of the way. And I went in
to watch him. He was doing music at the time
because Paul did the music, so it was kind of
fascinating to watch them work.

Speaker 5 (01:44:35):
And you know, and.

Speaker 6 (01:44:37):
Pep was he was great, Like I learned a lot
from him, Like like when I spent around.

Speaker 5 (01:44:41):
You, the want to watch when to watch? I want
to watch that whole thing.

Speaker 6 (01:44:43):
At the end, that camera, I mean could not have
been closer to my face. It was in my face
and and it was almost impossible to not look down
the throat of that lens because the lens right.

Speaker 5 (01:44:55):
Here, so I had to like really focus, I had.

Speaker 6 (01:44:58):
To pick something in the the husk of the lens
cap and just stare at that with every out and
still perform. So yeah, I mean, so these guys just
really were a thrill to watch every step.

Speaker 5 (01:45:13):
I mean, we had a really.

Speaker 6 (01:45:15):
Loaded team on this, like everybody came to make this
one work, you know, and it.

Speaker 2 (01:45:18):
Being your first film, there must have been some things
on it where you were like, wow, were they going
to do this?

Speaker 6 (01:45:23):
Well, I will tell you, like something very interesting happened
with me on this film, which is I was so excited.
I had a camcorder and I asked them, Hey, is
it okay when I'm not shooting, can I just come
and shoot behind the scenes stuff. So, dude, I have
all this behind the scenes footage because there was no

(01:45:44):
BTS company.

Speaker 2 (01:45:46):
Wait, you're adding me that's that's seriously. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:45:50):
So there's the scene so in the little town part
where like the motorcycles dragging that lady, remember the stunt woman. Yeah,
and what one jumps over a barrel and the barrel
blows up and the other one drives by dragging the woman.

Speaker 5 (01:46:04):
I recorded all that.

Speaker 6 (01:46:06):
Behind the scenes stuff and then while and so I
could literally it's funny where I'm doing this with you
because I've said on my channel I wanted you. I'm
gonna do a PM thing too. Maybe I'll bring you
on that, uh, and I want to use this stuff
and cut it in. I was gonna have Paullen and
guy called Joe to do this as well. That's why
when he called you, I was like, in the mindset,
I'm like, oh my god, this is so funny. And

(01:46:27):
I had this footage of me holding like an sixteen
and I'm like, when the hell was I holding that gun?
Like I have no memory of that? Like it was
so bizarre.

Speaker 2 (01:46:36):
So have you, as an editor by trade, have you
put together sort of your own behind the scene thing
or is it still just sort of.

Speaker 6 (01:46:44):
Well finally, yeah, I digitized it all and I have
it all in standby. But what I was gonna wait
and do is once I've interviewed like Paul and you know,
I want to call Jim Cody and see if Robert
will come on as well. If I can get that
is story sort of like what you're doing as well,
and piece it together, then I have something to roll
on top of it and really make it something special.

Speaker 5 (01:47:05):
So that's what I'm hoping to actually do with it.
This doesn't exist anywhere else except right here, right all this.

Speaker 2 (01:47:12):
Stuff, Yeah, I mean that's insane and I'm very excited
about that. I've already subscribed to you on YouTube, so
I will I will look at I will look out
for that. Yeah, I followed you and subscribe to your
stuff because I want to. I want to see what
you're doing. I watched a few of your videos. They're awesome,
They're they're great. I really enjoyed the I watched one
where you were going to your local thrift stores, which

(01:47:33):
is something that I do on a weekend basis, so
it was fun to see the kind of stuff you
were picking up. So yeah, we'll look forward to seeing that. Then,
are there stories about Steel Frontier that we haven't got
into yet that my questions haven't elicited a story that
I don't want to pass by.

Speaker 6 (01:47:48):
Yeah, I mean just for the audience, because I don't
know how much they know. But I'll break it down
just into the simplest things of dressing rooms. So, uh,
this is my first dressing room had my name on it,
like it's you know, we all it's this bank of
you know, it's like a little eighteen wheeler and in
it is little skinny like you can put your arms

(01:48:09):
out and probably touch the sides, right, So it's just
enough to have a little cot to lay on so
you can rest. But then there's like a sink, a toilet,
and like a hanger so if you need to hang
your costumes up.

Speaker 5 (01:48:19):
And I mean, dude, and it was like a TV
up there with the radio. Like to me, it was
that was everything.

Speaker 6 (01:48:25):
I was like driving a Rolls Royce man like this
is for me. And just from that and I'll tell
you like I even took a photo there. I did
one of these little you know, like selfies into the mirror.

Speaker 5 (01:48:40):
Because I never put the.

Speaker 6 (01:48:42):
Entire costume on until this shooting day, right, and they
handed me all the pieces and I went into this
thing and I put it all on.

Speaker 5 (01:48:51):
I'm like, oh my god, look at this thing I'm wearing.
And do what I popped out of the thing.

Speaker 6 (01:48:56):
Like all the crews in there and everybody just looked like,
oh my guy, Like what was this guy have?

Speaker 5 (01:49:03):
Like feather jacket and all this stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:49:05):
I mean, it was just from the start, like like
every little thing of this movie was just electric. So
you know the room and you know coming out and
just your dressing room.

Speaker 5 (01:49:16):
I don't know.

Speaker 6 (01:49:16):
It was so great and the caterers were amazing, even
the caters is have a photo of me with bos
vents and right next to the caterers that was colorious.

Speaker 5 (01:49:24):
He's like eating a sandwich, and I'm.

Speaker 7 (01:49:26):
Like, hey, I'm really surprised to hear. I mean, I'm
not surprised here, but but I don't think I ever
thought of PM as having even remote behind the scenes
creature comforts, just because I'd always heard that they basically
put all the budget into the movie. Uh, and therefore

(01:49:46):
I just assumed the cars hung out, I don't know,
in their cars or whatever.

Speaker 5 (01:49:49):
That something.

Speaker 2 (01:49:52):
Right, I'm pleased to hear that there was at least,
you know, food and a little room on set for
you guys.

Speaker 5 (01:49:59):
Absolutely.

Speaker 6 (01:50:00):
Yeah, I mean, like, I know, Joe's Joe had a
little bit bigger He didn't have a skinny thing like
we did Joe Lara.

Speaker 5 (01:50:06):
You know, he had a little bit bigger trailer.

Speaker 2 (01:50:08):
Yes, but yeah, and he did you. I mean, I
know you're not in in in a ton of scenes
with him, but like, what was Joe Laura on set?
Because he comes across this very sort of enigmatic I guess,
but was he like that in person? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (01:50:24):
I mean he was.

Speaker 6 (01:50:24):
He seemed like he's when he gets to work, he's
he's ready to work. He seems very focused, at least
the scenes I'm in with.

Speaker 5 (01:50:32):
And then some I would just stick around and watch,
like when I was done for the day.

Speaker 6 (01:50:36):
Oftentimes I didn't just leave, like I wanted to keep
watching other people shoot stuff.

Speaker 5 (01:50:41):
Sure, because I love the process.

Speaker 6 (01:50:43):
I always have, always have loved filmmaking and to watch
these guys, these masters like shoot these things. But Joe
was like very and then every once in a while,
you know, because I was the comic relief, I would
make him laugh.

Speaker 5 (01:50:54):
If I could make Joe laugh, I was having a
good day.

Speaker 6 (01:50:57):
But also when to leave him alone because he had
like an intense scene with Stacy coming up, and you know,
they had it. So that's what I took off with
Jim Cody and Robert O'Reilly and we just yucked it
up and told story.

Speaker 2 (01:51:11):
That's what made me laugh earlier when you were saying
about the stuntman that you were talking to, because obviously
one of the things that struck me when watching Steel
Frontier is and in fact, there's there's a couple of
other PM films where everyone has those like that, long
like late eighties, early nineties, like either grunge or metal hair,
like they have that long hair that was that was

(01:51:32):
a trend back then, and I'm like, not practical for fighting,
and not practical for motorbike riding, and not practical for
stunts at all, because you know, there's there's points where
Joe Lara's hair is like all over his face. I'm like,
he can't see who's hitting or what he's fighting so
much hair. Yeah, but then obviously Brandon Lee had long,

(01:51:53):
lank hair in the crow as well, So obviously the
stuntman he had long hair or did he wear a
wig or did you talk to him about.

Speaker 5 (01:52:01):
Jeff had long hair as well.

Speaker 6 (01:52:03):
I don't think it was as long as Joe's, so
when he did the stunts, I think he might have
been wearing a wig. But Jeff had long hair too. Yeah,
it was a fantastic crew. I'll give you a very
funny story.

Speaker 5 (01:52:13):
That no one knows.

Speaker 6 (01:52:14):
So you see us driving in this scene, right, I'm
in the car right, and it's like and it's a
sweet Caddy, you know where you like, Bacchus has the
red Cadillac.

Speaker 5 (01:52:23):
And then so we shoot the scene the next day,
the car is missing. It's gone, it's stolen. Where is it?
No one can find this car. So if you see
us drive in, do you notice.

Speaker 6 (01:52:35):
That Bacchus gets out of the passenger side of someone
else's car and I'm walking in like this, Ah.

Speaker 5 (01:52:43):
I'm like chasing the cars.

Speaker 6 (01:52:45):
I'm like what am I doing on the ground just
because there was no car, and so if you're kind
of aware of that, it's like, where's the red Cadillacts.

Speaker 5 (01:52:54):
It was missing.

Speaker 6 (01:52:55):
So that's why I was asked to just walk behind
the cars. Of course, now I'm sucking in all this
dirt and every I was getting wet after every take.
I was putting like full chicken boy into those takes,
and then I'm like, like to catch your breath because
of that dust and stuff.

Speaker 5 (01:53:09):
It took a while. So when they're like back to one,
I'm like, hang on a second.

Speaker 6 (01:53:13):
Yeah, I'm like, I mean five minutes, right, because everyone
else is sitting in a car.

Speaker 5 (01:53:18):
And not breathing in this dirt, I'm walking right behind
the car.

Speaker 2 (01:53:21):
Just you should have worn a big fake beak that
you could have breathed through. You're gonna put a face
mask underneath the beak.

Speaker 6 (01:53:30):
Or wear like a lady scarf because apparently I take
everything that Bacchus has.

Speaker 5 (01:53:35):
Ye take that he's taken. I take a piece. So
we would have made sense to have like a full
lady's scarf around my face. I did not, so I
sucked in after.

Speaker 2 (01:53:43):
That, which also makes a weird thing because obviously there's
that thing in Muppet movies where Gonzo is running around
with a chicken camilla.

Speaker 5 (01:53:51):
His chick camilla, right.

Speaker 2 (01:53:54):
And you're always like, well, one is Gonezo. I know
later on they said he was an alien, but like
you're like, first of all, one is gone so and
and is he romantically in love with the chicken? Like
what's going on with the chicken?

Speaker 5 (01:54:05):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:54:06):
Well, it sort of makes Bacchus and you then, I guess,
in a weird way of steel Frontier, if he's giving
you all women. I ever, well, when anyone says chickens,
the first thought I go to is Gonzo. That's always

(01:54:26):
my h that's my that's my go to is because
Gonzo always just has a fleet of chickens around him,
and you just don't question it. You're just when you
when you grow up with the Muppets, you're just like,
I guess he likes chickens.

Speaker 5 (01:54:39):
The chicken Guy. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:54:41):
So I started a YouTube channel called Huck's pop Culture Cafe.
So I name it after my last name, which is Huckabuz.
So it's my nickname growing.

Speaker 5 (01:54:48):
Up as Huck.

Speaker 6 (01:54:49):
Because there's already a couple of Brian's in the collecting community,
so I was like, well, I can't do another Brian something,
so let's just do Huck. And so now I'm just
known the commun over as Huck and I do morning
shows every single Tuesday.

Speaker 5 (01:55:04):
I did one this morning.

Speaker 6 (01:55:06):
It's always about box office and new releases and movie
news and stuff like that.

Speaker 5 (01:55:10):
It's super fun.

Speaker 6 (01:55:11):
And then you know, yeah, anything else physical or media
related or just pop culture related, because I didn't want
to just pigeonhole it about physical media. That's why I
made it the pop Culture Cafe. So now I can
talk about toys, or I could talk about just going
to the cinema, like anything that's sort of you know,
connected to pop culture as part of the channel, and

(01:55:31):
it's whatever idea I come up with is what I shoot,
and then I put it up. I do challenges sometimes
with the communities, like all right, let's pretend you're on a.

Speaker 5 (01:55:39):
Remote dude, I should do.

Speaker 6 (01:55:41):
Dude, here we are going to come up with doing
right now, So I would do these things about if
you're on a movie deserted island and you can only
bring one movie for every letter of the alphabet, what.

Speaker 5 (01:55:49):
Would you bring?

Speaker 6 (01:55:50):
And so I did mind it, and then all of
a sudden people love that, so everyone started.

Speaker 5 (01:55:54):
Doing there you know, you can only bring one.

Speaker 6 (01:55:56):
So now I wonder if we could do like a
little post apocalyptic type, you know, and put that challenge out,
like if you could pick five pump you know, post
apocalyptic movies to bring to that island.

Speaker 5 (01:56:08):
You know, we'll see what people come up with.

Speaker 6 (01:56:09):
Yeah, and that, you know, and tell them you can't
just lean on Mad Max.

Speaker 5 (01:56:14):
You have to dive deeper than that.

Speaker 2 (01:56:16):
Oh yeah, because I will say, like any Mad Max
should be off the table. Yeah, it should be exact exactly.

Speaker 6 (01:56:24):
Still Frontiers rated R right, which is funny because by
today's standards, it doesn't feel like an R rated film.
It just has lots of violence, there's very little swearing,
and there's no nudity.

Speaker 5 (01:56:35):
You know, It's funny. This is the first my daughter.
I have a daughter who's seventeen now a couple of
years ago.

Speaker 6 (01:56:40):
This was the first R rated movie I showed her
was Daddy's Movie, and that was pretty fun. I'm like,
all right, you're about to watch something it's gonna warn you.

Speaker 5 (01:56:49):
Yes, And it was nothing like the violence was I
think kids are just desensitized or something, you know, like
a doctor.

Speaker 2 (01:56:58):
And she liked it, so oh yeah, of course. I
mean again, I don't know anyone who generally likes film
who would watch this and not enjoy it. I would
be very surprised if someone didn't get something out of it,
because there's just enough. There's just enough going on, you know,
all the time. So as we wrap up now, thanks
ever so much for your time tonight. It's been really

(01:57:18):
fantastic talking with you, Brian. Best of luck with everything
you're doing on YouTube.

Speaker 6 (01:57:23):
Well, it's been a pleasure job. Thank you so much
for having me on, and we will be in touch.
I can't wait to see where we go from here.

Speaker 2 (01:57:30):
So I really hope you enjoy that trio of interviews.
And now back to the rest of the regular program. Yeah,
so let's Seeah, we should talk about the Henchman. There's
some great hench work going on here. In fact, there's

(01:57:50):
one particular henchman that every so often in all like
as a sort of scene transition, you hear him back
in the background shout out stuff like, come on, you
tire chuckers, chuck them tires like you hear like you
hear like little things like he's getting them whipping the
townspeople back into shape. There's some great like little uh,

(01:58:12):
you keep your ear out, you'll hear like some neat
little sort of slang terms that this post apocalyptic world has.
But we've got obviously, Caine Harder as as Kinton, gets
quite a large role in this, and in fact, on
my DVD is listed on the DVD it says bo
Spencon Caine Harder, and Brian James, so they are listed

(01:58:33):
as in fact, Joel's name not even on the front
of this, poor Joe Larra. But yeah, anyway, so we
get we get Caine Harder, who's great, very violent and
as I say, wrapping his Jason, his famous Jason character
on his beret. We get James C. Victor as Julie's

(01:58:57):
which is Brian James's sniveling sun. He's great. We get
Billy Sullivan, Billy L. Sullivan as Lake that's the boy,
that's the little boy, the kid. We get Brian Huckerba
as Chicken Boy. We get Jim Cody Williams as Charlie Backus.
He shows up as almost everyone does. If you're into

(01:59:21):
B movies, you have to have shown up on an
episode of What Matt silk Stalkings. Every single person from
all of the B movies we've covered for the last
like five years have all tread the bollets at Silk Stalkings,
as has this fine gentleman Jim Cody Williams tremendous facial hair,

(01:59:43):
I mean in everything that he's in, phenomenal facial hair.
We get Robert O'Reilly as Evermore, and we get the
writer and co director himself, Jacobson Hart as Green Street, right,
and Adolfo Canonas as Deacon. That rounds out our henchmen.

(02:00:05):
But they're all great. They're all great, right.

Speaker 1 (02:00:07):
And also Coles McKay was a henchman. He's playing cards
with them at one point, and I think he gets
if he gets shot.

Speaker 2 (02:00:15):
He doesn't have a name though, he doesn't have Yeah,
he's not he's not a named hench But and even
Paul Volt shows up as Lee, right, but a great
I think, a great set of henchmen. I think I really,
I really like them. They've all got their own look.
And at one point doesn't Spencer like call them out,

(02:00:38):
and it kind of cuts to each one of them,
and I think when it cuts to Deacon, he just
like has that like tobacco drool his mouth. Uh, phenomenal,
great big tombstone yellow teeth and just a big long
string of tobacco drool that comes out of his mouth. Yeah,
such a fantasm. Any other favorite scenes man in the movie.

(02:01:00):
Let's not let's we could talk about the ending, but
is there any favorite scenes you have until up until then?

Speaker 1 (02:01:05):
I mean, I like the I like the duel. That's
that's a great one because you know, you get that
moment where Spencer, so there's a duel that is about
to happen between Laura and the Sniveling Sun, and Spenceon
goes up to Laura and says, you know, if you
you know that's that's Quantrelle's son. If you kill him,
a lot of people are gonna even come after you.
And so this is a kind of one of those

(02:01:26):
moments where you get some really good writing in the film,
like okay, but but the result is something wacky, right,
because the sun goes to draw, Lara shoots the gun
out of his hands and then starts shooting the gun
up in the air, kind of like like your your
Super Mario and you're your you know, your your cape
and your bouncing, you know. And it was like a
really funny moment and.

Speaker 2 (02:01:46):
The best bit about the what sells that whole thing
because he's just like firing in the air and you're
just seeing the gun like flying around, he says. He
then walks towards Julie's. The gun falls out of the
gun and Lara just casually grabs it and hands it
back to it. It's so well done.

Speaker 1 (02:02:02):
It's so beautiful. Yeah, it's it's beautiful, and it's it's
one of those ones that I think when you write it,
you're probably like, well, what is this gonna look like?
And it could go either way? Right, that scene could
go And to be honest, I say that scene could
go either way. I think you could watch that and
be a split mind.

Speaker 3 (02:02:18):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:02:19):
I think it's one of those things where there's there's
a line and if you watch that scene and you
enjoy that scene, then then this movie's gonna work for you.
And if you watch that scene and you go, Okay,
come on, guys, get over yourself. You know, what are
we doing here? It's ridiculous that this is probably not
the movie for you. I think, you know, and I
think that's kind of the case with this entire film.
I think this film is one of those movies it's like,
it's not like you get either you get or you

(02:02:40):
don't get it. I think it's more like, you know,
it's it's doing its own thing, right it It's it's
you know, and whether you know, if you get it,
you get it. If you if you enjoy it, you
enjoy it. But if you enjoy it, you're really going
to enjoy it. Kind of movie.

Speaker 2 (02:02:54):
Definitely, And so yeah, it's it's definitely doing its own thing.
It definitely doesn't feel like anything else that I think
PM Entertainment does. I don't know if I'm right in
saying it feels to me like it has the largest
body count of any PM Entertainment movie, because, like I say,
there's sequences in the movie where you know, a guy

(02:03:16):
on sort of a World War two looking machine gun
mows down like twenty guys. You obviously have all the
henchmen that he takes out. You have like the big
shootout and fistfight and everything that happens at the beginning.
You have at least a few crashes and explosions and
things out on the highway, you know. I think like

(02:03:38):
a good decent amount of people like perish in this movie.
And then you have the final sequence, which is incredible.
One little bit I have to mention before we get
to the final sequence is Bo s Fenson snapping necks
and cashing checks with the three road sheeeters in the desert.
Bo doesn't do very much in this movie, but when
he does, it's a joy.

Speaker 1 (02:04:00):
Yes. Yeah, And I'm trying to think so so both
fencing because because he's about the same size as Dolf,
they're both big, like six.

Speaker 2 (02:04:08):
Well yeah, Bo's well over six foot three. I think, yeah,
he's a big, big guy.

Speaker 1 (02:04:12):
And so I wasn't gonna say, like, okay, you know,
Dolph is getting it. But actually both Benson was younger
when he made this than Dolph is now. He's he
was fifty five when we made this. Dolphins is in
his sixties. Because I was gonna say, like, this is
kind of the next place for Dolph to go. Dolph
needs to walk in the desert somewhere and just have
a bunch of like cannibals nipping at his heels and

(02:04:35):
him just like kind of tossing them aside, like you know,
like they're they're dogs nipping at you or whatever. Yeah,
because it was it was a beautiful place. And I
think both Fenson when he was coming to America from Sweden,
you know, and he started getting these acting roles while
he was studying metaphysics in the California University. I don't
know what he you know, saw himself, you know what,

(02:04:55):
what what roles he saw that well.

Speaker 2 (02:04:57):
Both Fencon did. He studied metaphysics, believe.

Speaker 1 (02:05:00):
So, I believe so. I don't realize he was the
Marines and marine in the US as well. But yeah,
he was pursuing a degree of PhD in metaphysics, so
not quite Dolph's mechanical engineering that he was pursuing my team,
but yeah, but yeah, you know, but but I mean
looking at his entire career, you know, I don't know
where you put that moment when when he's doing that,

(02:05:23):
it's got to be up there. It's gotta be a
top five, you know, well.

Speaker 2 (02:05:25):
Yeah, a Swenser moment. Oh yeah, it's phenomenal. I call
it the snapping necks and cashing check sequence. But he
goes off and he goes to Brian James, who apparently
has like an underground or like cave based radar like lair.
I don't know what he's doing that, Like, what what
you've been doing, Brian? Just hanging out in your radar lair?

(02:05:47):
Look at a big green screen. Why have you been
doing that? Anyway? I thought you were like forming an empire. Anyway,
Brian James been hiding out in his little little lair.

Speaker 6 (02:05:57):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (02:05:59):
Swenson comes back, says, you know everyone's dead. You've got
to come sort this out. He Brian James rides back
into town and is immediately confronted with like some upright
coffins in which is his son dead? We get Brian
James doing the most the best, like none wailing and

(02:06:20):
crying and whatever right in the camera. It's absolutely fantastic.
I love it. And then as he comes into town,
they've set up and I love shit like this in
westerns or action movies or whatever, where you go, what
have we got to work with? Oh, we've got a
bunch of townspeople who have never like really shot anything
any before or done anything before. But if I Joe

(02:06:41):
Lara strategically placed them around the town, we can make
them a formidable attack for Brian James's remaining hench folk
that they're going to show it with James. So you
get the as Brian James goes into town, you get
a lot of reaction shots of like James like looking
off whatever, and then you see shots of like people

(02:07:02):
po poking up with a gun and firing out him,
or like running out of a window and firing at him,
or like someone up on a roof or like they
you know what I mean, They've sort of set it
up perfectly and in the western town for them to succeed.
And then the big you know, they they blow up
some of the buildings. I mean, they really don't care
about the town anymore. They're just like, we're going to
fucking annihilate this town just to get Brian James out

(02:07:23):
of it. And the ultimate act of annihilation is that
much to like James is like what are they doing now?
Is that Joe Lara runs like runs up the inside
of a brick smoke stack chimney that they have at
the end of this town, runs all the way up

(02:07:44):
the inside a big spile staircase, get to the top,
having set a bunch of charges ab sails like, runs
down there and you see the stuntman, like you see
the stuntman almost get like overcome by the velocity. Whatever.
I'm not good at physics, so I'm not good at words.
But you know what I mean, Well.

Speaker 1 (02:08:04):
He's doing a forward repel, right and yeah, and he's
just going straight down, which you.

Speaker 2 (02:08:10):
See the you see the speed of that almost overtake
the stunt man because he does it like he's running
down the side of the brick chimney for the first
half of it. And then at a certain point, the
falling momentum whatever that physics term is, the falling momentum
meets you know, the wind and meets the chimney and
meets a stunt man, and he at a certain point

(02:08:31):
he's just like a fuck it, I'm just gonna like
let the rope go. It just fall basically, but it's
a not I mean, just a phenomenal stunt, I mean,
an incredible stunt. And then as he's running away, they
detonate the entire fucking chimney and it is the largest
explosion PM Entertainment ever did ever in the history of

(02:08:54):
their films. It is an impressive site. I mean it
is an impressive site. It's like if you were remember
in the beginning of Lethal Weapon three where they detonate
that building, and obviously Los Angeles was detonating that building anyway,
and they just said, can we come down and shoot
them running out of the building before you detonate it.
Beginning of leath and Weapon three, you see an entire building,

(02:09:16):
like truly blown up. It's like in one of the
Ocean's elevens, you see a casino when they do this
in Vegas all the time, but they do a controlled
explosion to bring down a casino and level it and whatever.
Well that's what they did here, except it being PM Entertainment,
it was kind of controlled. Quite No, it's it's worth

(02:09:38):
the price of admission. I mean, God, if nothing happened
in this movie and then it just at the very
end they blow up the chimney, you'd be like, oh fuck,
this is great.

Speaker 1 (02:09:46):
Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely amazing. And it's the way they
set it up where it's like, you know, you're watching it,
and Lara's on the top of this thing. Brian James says,
go get him. So obviously, you know what's the smartest
thing to do with your battye. Well, you want to
go through a choke point where you're you're made your
your greater numbers suddenly become a disadvantage. But also you

(02:10:09):
want to go through this choke point against somebody who
has the higher ground on you. None of that can
go bad, right, none of that's gonna go wrong. So
you already know what's happening, and you see Laura's like
lighting what looks like like a long stick of vanilla
or something. He's just lighting this thing, and you're like, okay,
all right, so this is just gonna you know, blow
up all these guys and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:10:27):
But does he light the fuse and the fuse starts
to burn up as he comes down exactly, like he
the fuse is going up as he's running down.

Speaker 1 (02:10:35):
Yeah, it's great, exactly, And that's I think that's when
you start to realize, like this is not just going
to be like these guys getting stuck in this choke
point of this ladder and getting killed. But something bigger
is coming here.

Speaker 2 (02:10:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:10:45):
And then when he runs away you realize, actually, no,
you're right, Like he does the forward repel and he's
he's repelling down. You realize like, oh no, this is
this is what they're doing here. Yeah, and then when
it actually happens and you realize like this is this
is like like this isn't like you know Antonio Margariti's
great model work here, this is this is something else. Yeah,

(02:11:06):
it's it's utterly it is. These are the moments that
make pm PM that you watch one of these and
you hope you get a moment like this, But also
you can't imagine. There isn't a way to imagine enough
to be able to fully hope for something like this,
Like what you're hoping for is not this. Now it
ends up being better than you hope for.

Speaker 2 (02:11:27):
And no, mean it's not even the climax of the movie. No,
like there's more action to come. They blow up an
entire town. Basically they shoot a ton of bad guys
and no, so you see the little kid who's been
We didn't really talk about this, but Stacy Foster has
a little kid with her. Of course she does, and

(02:11:49):
the little kid ends up in an old school bus
that has been kind of retrofitted as sort of a
post puckalymptic tank. He's in there, of course he is.
Brian James decides I'm in a hijack this and drive
the bus off, so of course everyone has to chase it.
I no need to get Brian James, but to get
the kid back and one of the like as if

(02:12:10):
it wasn't. As he drives out of town, he hits
his dead son, and his dead son like splats up
on the windscreen, spinning blood all over the things, and
like Brian James is like whimpering and like what like
it just from the explosion of the chimney bus chase,
it just goes fucking insane.

Speaker 1 (02:12:28):
Right, It's classic PM as well, Like you know we
talked about there's other PM films where like what would
be enough? Right, the explosion of that tower would be enough.
They're like, then we're going to tack a chase onto that, Yes,
And when we packed this chase on, this is not
just gonna be a chase. It's gonna be chase where
stuntmen are getting on roofs of cars and smashing through
wind screens and all that kind of stuff. It's like,

(02:12:48):
you know, and it ends with a huge we can.

Speaker 2 (02:12:50):
Have Brian James run over his dead son who's already
it's amazing.

Speaker 1 (02:12:57):
Yeah again, everybody else would be like it's like when
people say about Gerald Ford the president, where it was like,
you know, he was like this this you know, all
pro football player at Michigan. It had this really great
career and that's usually enough for most people. But then
Gerald Ford goes on to be like Speaker of the
House and president. It's like PM. You know, for most
most places, you blow up that huge building. That's enough,
you know, But PM's like, no, no, no, I'm going to

(02:13:18):
go on to have you know, or Fred Williams with
his great football career, goes on, I have a great
movie career, like this is a movie career. After this
is Fred Williams's movie career. Is this chase scene?

Speaker 2 (02:13:26):
Yeah, so we get this, We get a fantastic chase
scene with all sorts of vehicular madness going on and
with I mean and basically like we we get to
a point at the very end where uh, you know,
Joe Lara and Brian James are like lying and bleeding
out on the tarmac and Lara's quick draw just finishes

(02:13:52):
James off in the last minutes, because otherwise, you know,
maybe James would be able to get a shot off himself.
And then you know, the the Stacey and her boy
are like there and they're trying to figure it out.
And then the trash can man, who I know that's
not his name, but I'm calling him that, with his
little like it's not a tinfoil hat, but he has

(02:14:12):
like a you know, like a little funnel type hat
thing and whatever. He brings Lara's motorbike from town up
to the spot where they've had this big crash, and
you know, he's like, oh, man, I love this bike,
like I almost took it for myself, like it's a
great bike, but I brought it for you, mister Lara,
brought it for you. I'm calling him mister Lara. His
name was, his name's Johnny Yuma. Of course, he's like,

(02:14:33):
I brought it for youma, I brought it for you. You know,
because he's trying to be like the guy and the
way he's kind of trying to be like the Sancho Panza,
I guess to the Don Quixote of Joe to use
a very literary terminology, but yeah, he's trying to be
like the guy. And you see this in westerns all
the time. The stranger comes into town and then there's

(02:14:53):
like the little guys like I'll help you out, mister.
You know it's a stranger with no name, like and like,
what's amazing? The human drives off like there's no like
big reconciliation with Stacy Foster. You see them kiss earlier
in the movie, and you think, all right, this is
the time where he's gonna live happily ever after with
Foster and a kid. No time for that, and why,

(02:15:16):
because this whole movie was he was a bounty hunter
who was trying to get General Quantrell. Uh. And as
he drives away, the little wanted dead or alive piece
of paper winds up with Stacy. She looks at it
and she's like, wow, that's why I was here this
whole time. And so he wraps Lara, wraps James up

(02:15:37):
in a blanket, straps him to the back of the bike,
and high tails it out into the sunset. Maybe like
all good westerns, what a great movie? Is this?

Speaker 1 (02:15:46):
A ton of fun? Yeah, a ton of fun. You
you can't do much better than this on a Saturday night,
you know whatever, I always say pizza and beer. I
think whatever. I don't really drink beer much anymore, so
I probably should say more like pizza and soda. That's
probably more of my my deal. But either way, you know,
or pizza and you know. We would call back to
a previous episode we did a peach kata you can.

Speaker 2 (02:16:08):
I have to say, like, I think, what is most
flabbergasting about this movie is that it has any negative reviews.
I can understand someone watching it and going I can
see what they were trying to do or whatever, but
it didn't completely tick on me. But I respect what
they did. There are some reviews on IMDb that I
was reading that I was like, where people are giving

(02:16:31):
it like two stars and saying that it's the worst
movie they've ever I cannot I cannot understand that. I
can not understand that. And we're living in a world
where I can't understand a lot. Matt right about what's
going on. But I really don't understand even the most

(02:16:51):
jaded of of I don't know straight to video watching
dudes would watch this movie and get something out of it.
If you're not I just don't know what to tell you.

Speaker 1 (02:17:02):
No, I agree with you. I think, you know, I
can understand you know, you know, somebody you know, grading
up maybe the harder thing, like three stars.

Speaker 2 (02:17:08):
You know, I can see it between four to six stars.
That all that I'll understand someone being like, yeah, I
was I.

Speaker 1 (02:17:14):
Guess three five, I guess yeah, three out of five?

Speaker 2 (02:17:16):
Yeah right, yeah, yeah, I can see ye yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:17:21):
But it's it. There's too much fun going on here objectively.
But I think the other thing though, I think from
from PM's standpoint, you know, when you watch like for example,
Stacy Foster trying to you know, fire at an m
sixteen and it just looks ridiculous, Like PM doesn't always
try to sell things, you know, like a lot of
movies they want to sell it to you. You know,
can this actor sell this scene? Can they do it?

(02:17:42):
Can they make it work? And I think this movie
almost didn't care. Like, for example, Joe Lar's character. I
think part of the reason why his character is so
good is that he's not trying to sell us anything,
like I'm gonna be the Clint Eastwood character. He's just
doing what he's doing, and he's saying his funny lines,
you know, like like well what do I have to
run for? Or like you know when the kid comes
up to him and says, you know, are you gonna

(02:18:04):
kill so and so? Well, there's no profit in that.
Oh okay, well you're gonna kill No, there's no profit
in that either, you know. Okay. Well, it's just like
you know, just like those. It's it's not trying to
be it doesn't I don't want to say it doesn't
care what you think of it. But it's not trying
to sell you anything. No, it's it's saying, this is
our movie, this is what we're doing. You like it?
Like it? You know, that's great? We hope you do. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:18:25):
I just just because it's one of the films where
PM Entertainment is firing on all cylinders. The acting across
the board is genuinely good. It's not just good for
a B movie. It's genuinely good. The cinematography across the
board is not just good for a PM Entertainment movie.
It is genuinely like beautifully filmed in places. The soundtrack

(02:18:48):
is not just good for me, it's like genuinely good. Now, look, yes,
there are exploitation elements there are pm entertainment elements. There's
action elements as ridiculous explosions, and if you want not
aware of those tropes, maybe that great son you maybe
you look at that and you go, oh, that was
a bit great. I just don't know how you watch

(02:19:08):
this movie and don't love something in it. I mean
there is otherwise you just don't like movies like I
don't like and I mean that like, you know, we
can go back and forth on on you know why.
I'm not a Star Wars fan, but I am a
Star Trek fan, but I don't like. I don't watch
Star Wars and go oh it's a one star. Star
Wars is clearly not a why even the worst Star

(02:19:30):
Wars film is not a one star film. There's too
much skill involved, there's too much creativity involved, there's too
much storytelling involved. I don't happen to be a space
fantasy guy. I just don't happen to be that guy.
But when I watch it, I wouldn't give it a
one star. It's like three four stars. Even the worst
Star Wars films are, you know, a three four star.

(02:19:51):
And that's that's what I mean. It's like, if you
watch this movie I don't care what your films are,
what you like, what your taste is, genres, you're a
fan of whatever it is. If you like film in
its broad term and you can't give this at least
three out of five or five out of ten or whatever,

(02:20:12):
then I then you don't like film. I just I
that's that's how much I love this movie.

Speaker 1 (02:20:17):
Yeah, I agree. I think there's Especially as a PM fan,
I think this is just like a I don't know
if to say, like it's a you know, it should
be worth you know, if we're doing out of ten,
it should be four out of ten off the bus
and then it's just you add on these other pieces
to it and it gets it, you know, higher on
that I think, you know, I think some people go

(02:20:38):
in and they just you know, you never know, like
you never know what somebody's you know, going, you know,
when they're watching one of these, how well they're paying attention,
how much they're seeing things. I mean, the both both
fence and character. I mean, the things I love about
him is like like, for example, when he's breaking down
who these you know, he's in the bar and he's
telling Laura who all the characters are? Well, you can
see that Lara kind of uses that information when he's
deciding who he's picking off at certain points. Okay, these

(02:21:00):
guys aren't military men, so they're probably going to fall
for this trick about you know, you go into the barn,
there's an ambush in the barn, or you know, there's
little elements like that, but then you get the massive
PM elements. I mean that chasing at the end is amazing.
The chase scene at the you know, in the middle of.

Speaker 2 (02:21:15):
About like twenty five minutes is great. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:21:17):
Yeah, those those those kinds of things. For me, if
a movie is well paced, which this is well paced,
Like I said, it starts slow, it kind of but
when I say it starts slow, I mean it kind
of builds to something, so it's not like you're getting
dead moments. It's just more like it's sort of you know,
little bits here and there to they kind of grow
into something big until where we get to this huge
day new Mont, which is a classic PM Day new Mont.

(02:21:40):
I think if you're a PM fan, that's that you
can't ask for much more than that than what you're
getting with this movie.

Speaker 2 (02:21:45):
Well, also, I think just the change of scene for
PM is refreshing in the sense that we you know,
we see a lot of like either downtown Las Vegas
or downtown Los Angeles shot movies. As I indicated in
my introduction, there's a lot of like neon hues and
City after Dark kind of PM entertainment films. You've got those,

(02:22:07):
then you've got kind of the sci fi PM entertainment films,
which again kind of use a lot of that like
City after Dark stuff or big warehouses or whatever. But
when you think of something like T Force that uses
sort of that like bombed out trash heap kind of
area with the half broken buildings and whatever, and they

(02:22:28):
have those like dune buggy chases, And when you see
this there's a change of scene element that also if
you're a PM entertainment fan, just makes you go, oh,
this is a little fresh for the eyes, you know
what I mean?

Speaker 1 (02:22:41):
Yeah, yeah, which is it's another part of this that
makes it great. I mean, you know sometimes that that
you know, fresh for the eyes doesn't work when I
think of like Hollywood Safari, you know, maybe the kids
movie element, maybe it doesn't quite work, but you know,
for an adult oriented movie, yeah, this is yeah, I
agree with you. I just it for me. I mean again,
I didn't have it as high as you have it

(02:23:03):
for PM, but I have it pretty high. Like I said,
I've got it as like my ninth favorite of your.

Speaker 2 (02:23:08):
Ranking within PM is about nine, and I have it.
I think I have it joint first right now, but
I haven't figured out my I only have it ranked
on letterboxed by what I have it, and I have
it as a five. Actually, I have it as a
five out of five on letterbox. Now. You know, I
don't know as we go through. You know, I've seen

(02:23:29):
what forty PM entertainment movies at this point, and I'll
watch a ton more obviously as we go through, I'll
watch all of them. But you know, so I don't
know whether it holds on to the top five spot
that it is in right now, but I can tell
you from my list in terms of my top five

(02:23:50):
at the moment, I have Steel Frontier again, not in
any order, this isn't any order, but I have a
shotgun Steel Frontier, Living to Die, Ring of Fire three,
which I really loved and I hadn't seen before, so
I really enjoyed that, and Rage, and then the next
five I have Inferno Killer's Edge, The Yard of Dying,

(02:24:11):
Zero Tolerance, and Guardian Angel, and then I have t Force,
Last Man Standing, Pure Danger, The Sweeper in Silences, so
like it's in, It's in there, it's in like the
top Like I read out all the ones that Jacobs
and Hard has written, it's like, you know, it's top ten,
like in whether it's I think I put it in

(02:24:32):
my top five because I really think this is one
that I will This is one I will watch every year,
like this is a this is you know, this is
in my top twenty favorite films of all time at
this point, Like I that's how much I love it.
Other films if like Warrior of the Lost World is
a great example of this movie Hell Comes to Frogtown.

(02:24:52):
It's got a lot of like Hell Comes to frog
Town elements in it. And then the one that I mentioned, yes,
Will Gone Wild, So yeah, it's very similar to how
it comes to Frogtown, Will Gone Wild Warrior of the
Lost World. And I would consider those three that I
just mentioned kind of top tier in that genre. You know.

(02:25:13):
I actually as much as I love the Fred Williamson
Italian post apocalyptic Mad Max ripoffs, I don't love them
anywhere near as much as I love the four or
five that I've just mentioned, and Steel Frontier is there
with a bullet now.

Speaker 1 (02:25:28):
Yeah, well, I think the other reason why I like
this better than some of those Italian ones again is
that you don't get the gratuitous torture in this. You
don't get the rape. For whatever reason, they liked rape
a lot in those movies, they don't have that here.
You do get an assault, you use sexual assaults, but
you don't get you know, full on you know that
usually there's something that somebody's rescued in time or something
like that, and I think those are elements to this

(02:25:49):
that I appreciated that, Like, you know, I don't need
to go that far with my movies.

Speaker 2 (02:25:52):
You know. It's this dance is right up to the
line of exploitation that PM is comfortable with without going
over into uh, you know, gratuity. Finally, then ranking within
Joe Lara is difficult because, like I've only seen four
Joe Lara movies, so this one is number one. But

(02:26:13):
ranking within Brian James movies that's a little tougher, I.

Speaker 1 (02:26:16):
Think, because well, because there's two brain James right like
like like where like can I can I can I
play Blade Runner? I mean I don't even know, like
if you know, are armed and dangerous? Like like do
those ones uh belong in there? I like cause a
lot of others. I just think in terms of B movies,
I mean there's another PM flick in here, which I
don't you know, he's he's better in this than he

(02:26:36):
is in that, which is the Underground, Right? But yeah,
what was the one that we we talked about on
your podcast, the one he did with wings Houser.

Speaker 2 (02:26:45):
Oh that was great. That that's that's fantastic as well. Yeah,
I'm gonna forget what that's cooled?

Speaker 1 (02:26:49):
But dead Man Walking? Was it? Dead Man Walking?

Speaker 2 (02:26:52):
Brian James has also done an episode of Stok Silk Stalkings,
by the way.

Speaker 1 (02:26:55):
Of course, Yes, yes, we also he did a Highlander
episode too, and.

Speaker 2 (02:26:58):
An episode of Renegade with Lorenzo Lamas, who obviously has
been in lots of PERM entertainment films. Yes, the dead
Man Walking, and he reunites with wings Houser in Nightmare
at Noon. And you know, I would say, if we're
talking like B movie Brian James, right, we're talking, We're

(02:27:19):
not talking Blade Runner. And even Tango and Cash. Like,
we're not talking that. We're talking you know, dead Man Walking,
Nightmare at Noon, pret Asylum, Nemesis. Yeah, we're talking that.
Brian James. That's the Brian James when you show up
and you're like, oh, yeah, okay, this is gonna be
this is gonna be watchable because Brian's here and he'll

(02:27:40):
he'll carry me through it, even if the rest of
it's a piece of shit. I would probably put it
in the top four of Brian James.

Speaker 1 (02:27:49):
For the B movies. Yeah, yeah, for sure, I think
this is right up there, is one of his best
in the B movie area. You know again again like
I think, you know, Blade Runner, Armed and Dangerous, you
know those movies they probably put a different category, but
this one's definitely up there.

Speaker 2 (02:28:04):
Yeah. PM give him a little more to do. They
give him a little more of a thoughtful persona rather
than just sort of mad eye rolling exactly. And then
nim Ever at Noon, where does he even have a line, Like,
I know, he's just like hanging out in the desert
with a being an albino in a in a Colonel
Sanders outfit.

Speaker 1 (02:28:22):
But well, and then also too he plays the mad
scientist in Frogtown two where yes he does yes, yes
he could say carrot top in that one, yeah, which
is great.

Speaker 2 (02:28:32):
Yeah, but no, I mean, you know, I still think
that you know, dead Man Walking, Cherry two thousand, these
are great Brown James movies. But this is Yeah, this
is in the top three or four for me, I think, yeah,
yeah for sure. All right, well look, Matt, thank you
ever so much. This was a joy. This was everything
I wanted it to be. Yes, Steel Frontier was a

(02:28:54):
genuine discovery from me.

Speaker 1 (02:28:56):
Yeah, this is this is right up there is one
of my one of my favorite pms. Chase, they're all
a lot of times my favorite, so but this is
definitely up there, and I think it's it's definitely what
people should check out.

Speaker 2 (02:29:07):
Definitely. So all right, well, look, thank you ever so
much for being on this episode of the PM Entertainment podcast.

Speaker 3 (02:29:13):
Matt.

Speaker 2 (02:29:13):
You will come back. Of course you will come back.
You are my brother in PM Entertainment, so you'll hear
from Matt a lot on this podcast. But thank you
ever so much.

Speaker 1 (02:29:24):
Yes, thank you, thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (02:29:25):
It was a ton of fun and such a great
movie to start with.

Speaker 1 (02:29:28):
Yes, for sure, you know I'm now leaving the entertainment
podcast s

All Episodes

Episode 3 - Steel Frontier

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 3 - Steel Frontier