Welcome to yet another review right here at B-Movie Enema.

This week, we return to the letter Q with a movie that didn’t quite make the cut for Quly but was a tad bit too juicy to just throw onto the stack to review too far off into the future, so let’s talk about it now! We’re going to be looking at 1991’s Quiet Fire. Quiet Fire was something I know quite intimately… This was a direct-to-video release. I’ve sort of talked about this before but back in the back half of the 90s, I worked at a video store. Because of that, I had a lot of insight about things I didn’t really understand until I got a little older.

One of those things I learned was that there were three genres that shone brightly for people looking to consume home entertainment. Now, I’m not including a very obvious one for men and kinky couples (that being porn) because that’s fairly obvious, as is the fact that people who didn’t want to go to the theater to watch a movie would later catch them on video. No, the three that I’m referring to are thrillers, particularly ones that starred beautiful women being chased by dangerous men (Shannon Tweed was a massive star in this genre), horror, particularly the ones that were kind of at the tail end of the slasher era, and action.

And that’s what we have here, a direct-to-video action flick.

Man, I cannot tell you how huge action flicks were at the video store. Men would pretty much rent anything action-related if they included the following on the box covers: Chuck Norris, guns, an explosion, a city skyline that might be somewhere like Los Angeles, or a catchy title that evoked action. Quiet Fire has all but one of those things – Chuck. But that’s okay. We’ll swap him out with a sultry lady holding a gun. That’s two guns! This is gonna be action-packed!

One of the groups of guys who would gobble up action films on video was Hispanic guys. The store I worked at had a lot of immigrant workers around the area. I think they mostly lived in the apartments across the street from the store and they worked various jobs around the area from restaurants to more manual labor type stuff. But, almost on a daily basis, they would come into the store in the evenings and find an action flick to watch as a group. It doesn’t take long to understand why. It’s very likely these guys didn’t have the greatest command of English. So, you trade that out with action that doesn’t really require a great grasp of any language. You see a guy who looks like a good guy fighting a guy who looks like a bad guy. That’s all you really need to understand.

So, this is a pretty good reason why exploitation films are popular and fun. You don’t really need a whole lot of story to get in the way of the plot in order to entertain folks. If you can pick up on the action, you’ll be entertained. It’s why these guys got into action flicks. These guys weren’t renting dramas or comedies. That requires a lot more understanding of what’s being said or the plot which would be difficult in a different language.

Anyway, Quiet Fire is a good old-fashioned direct-to-video action flick. Starring in this movie is Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, who also directed this film. Hilton-Jacobs has nearly 100 credits over the course of a 50-year career. The guy is still working, but he got his start with a couple of uncredited roles in Death Wish and The Gambler. He also appeared in movies like Cooley High and TV miniseries like Roots and The Jacksons: An American Dream in which he played family patriarch Joe Jackson. While the guy doesn’t really have a lot giant movies on his resume, he’s incredibly recognizable by virtue of appearing in a lot of different things over a very long time. Interestingly, he also appeared in a direct-to-video spicy thriller called Indecent Behavior starring who else? Shannon Tweed, the queen of erotic thrillers in the 90s.

The most recognizable guy in the cast is the one and only Robert Z’Dar. Z’Dar is a Chicago guy who appeared in a ton of exploitation films of the 80s and 90s which included some pretty big-time video store stuff like Maniac Cop 2, Soultaker, and, of course, Samurai Cop. Despite how recognizable he is, despite how many of his films on the ol’ resume are right up the alley of B-Movie Enema, this is the first time Z’Dar has ever had a movie covered on this blog. There’s not really a whole lot to say about him. He’s certainly someone you can recognize immediately when you see him in a movie.

The movie kicks off in a dark city alley late at night. A guy is desperately trying to run away from a trio of pursuers. The guy on the run finds an old man getting into a car in the middle of a whole parking lot of nuthin’ and pushes the old man out of the way to get into the car and take off with it. Just as he does, one of the pursuers tries jumping ON TOP of the car while the other guys try to catch up. It looks like the three guys chasing after the dude in the car are also accompanied by a car with more guys in it.

Looks like this opening is a little bit TJ Hooker and a little bit of just flat-out action chaos.

The foot chase is now a car chase. The tailing car full of guys starts shooting at the lead car. Just as the guy up front is about to fire back at his pursuers, he gets shot in the shoulder. Thankfully, the guy is able to get away from the carload of what I have to assume are bad guys by way of a van suddenly appearing in the way causing the pursuers’ car running right into it and exploding like any good car in an action movie.

Later, we come to a vineyard where we hear a speech from J. William Whelan who is running for Senate. He tells an old war story about annihilating the enemy and winning the day against impossible odds. He says that if these old rich guys vote him into senate, he’ll make them all proud once more to be Americans and he’ll make America great again or something. I dunno… It’s wild no one has ever used that line as a campaign slogan.

A squirrelly fellow comes up and gets Whelan to explain that the target got away the night before and their contracted guys caught a bad case of the cinnamon toast crunches during the pursuit. Whelan is pissed.

After our eeeeeevil politician is introduced, we now meet Jesse Palmer. Jesse works at a fitness gym. He’s called up to the front desk because he has a visitor – Walt. Walt was the guy who was chased at the beginning of the movie by who we now know were Whelan’s goons. We find out that Walt got into trouble before. He was previously accused of breaking into a jewelry store. Walt says that’s the least of his worries now. He’s kind of in some shit.

In the middle of their conversation and catching up after five years since they last saw each other, Walt collapses and falls to the floor. Jesse sees the gunshot wound on Walt’s right shoulder. Walt says three things of importance. First, he had no other place to go than to find his old friend Jesse. Second, there’s a bunch of information about what the story is on a computer disk that he has in his possession. Third, Jesse’s next.

Before dying, he says one more thing… “Star.”

Now here’s a good sign that a movie isn’t that great. After Walt dies, Jesse goes to the police, as you do. They then interrogate him about the dead guy. It comes across as if they think HE is involved in foul play. Honestly, I don’t have a problem with a plotline that might bring heat on Jesse from either racist cops or cops we quickly discover are corrupt. However, this is the first time we meet these cops and they treat this guy who we have no indication that he’s involved with anything off at all like he’s a common thug. Not just that either! It’s like they see him as a murderer. We are already plenty on the side of Jesse after we see him deal with a guy hassling a girl in the gym and wanting to take her back to his place for sex. We don’t really need the cops hassling Jesse over reporting the death of a friend.

By the way, one of the cops is Robert Z’Dar. Now, listen… I would accept the cops being bad guys and possibly even antagonistic toward Jesse if they were in league with Whelan. However, you wouldn’t introduce them in this manner. You’d have them be interested in what happened in order to potentially get at the computer disk or pump Jesse for more information to eventually help the guy at the top of the bad guy pyramid. Instead, they just basically tell Jesse that Walt had a long rap sheet and I guess that means Jessie is guilty by association.

The problem with this scene aside from it being kind of cartoonish is that it’s not compelling. It’s not a scene that helps move the plot forward. Again, either make these guys part of the big overarching bad guy scheme by making them want to earn Jesse’s trust to get information for their boss or don’t have this scene or make them guys Jesse doesn’t implicitly trust but turn out to be helpful to him later.

After the cops first accuse Jesse of killing Walt, then kick him out of the station, and finally laugh at his request for protection, Jesse decides he needs a few drinks. He goes to the bar and tells the bartender of a story from his past. Where do Jesse and Walt know each other from? Vietnam. They served together in the same unit. He talks about a time when he was sleeping in his bunk one night and suddenly everything went crazy. A Viet Cong soldier snuck into the barracks with a knife. The VC fighter approached Jesse’s bunk but Walt not only disarms the attacker and kills him with his own knife.

So that’s two Vietnam War stories we’ve heard in this movie. I’m sure that won’t be a major part of how this movie plays out.

When Jesse goes home, he finds two attackers waiting for him inside his apartment. This scene is both really stupid and really fun. It’s fun in the silly exploitation way that of course there are two attackers and he will use kung fu to beat them. It’s silly as hell though because you can so easily tell this “living room” is a set. When Jesse throws one of the attackers up against the wall, you can see it wobble. These are simply sheets of drywall standing up on a soundstage. Look in the corner of the room in the above picture. There’s a gap between the two sheets of drywall. Another guy gets tossed into a bookcase that is already very clearly sagging in the middle of each shelf to allow for the guy to fall through the shelves. But look at the picture above. The room is this pinkish, purplish color. The window doesn’t really look out to anything and has a very bright light coming in. That’s because this isn’t a real apartment that would have normal windows, but this is a set that has this weirdly bright light coming into the room to help light the entire scene.

Now, while this does help prove to Jesse that he’s being targeted, especially when he runs out to his car and someone shoots at him, it’s not going to help the cops think he’s not involved with the murder of Walt because he broke one of the guys’ necks in his living room. He’s going to be lying there on the floor of his place. The guys shooting at Jesse chase after him, but they lose him.

Walt makes his way to the home of a girl coming home from a date with a nerdy little dude. The girl is Jesse’s ex-girlfriend Jana. He tells her he needs a place to stay because there were people waiting to jump him and/or kill him at his place. She doesn’t get good vibes from all this but knows he doesn’t lie. She offers her couch to sleep on. Later that night, she asks if he wants to talk about it, so he tells another story about Walt and him being in Vietnam. He says they were part of a covert team called Special Forces. You know, like G.I. Joe and shit.

We’re a fourth of the way through the movie and all we’ve seen is guys trying to kill other guys and three stories about Vietnam. I’m not even mad… It’s actually kind of one of those special movies that are cheap and not exactly that good, but definitely something that would have gotten a lot of play on cable and a lot of rentals at the video store. Considering Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs directed and starred in this, it’s one of those movies where he gives himself a couple serious and introspective monologues about being in war, the horrors of seeing death all around you, and all that jazz. He also uses other characters to give the exposition of how good and cool he is. Jesse talks about the good old days. The bartender gives him a reason to try to take charge and stop the bad guys by saying that Walt saved his life, thus he needs to man up and make it mean something. Then you have Jana talking about how good of a guy Jesse is despite their relationship not working out, etc. It’s all in service of vague stoicism that would make that Scottish fuckface who reviews movies on YouTube cream his kilt over.

In the surprise not a single person on the planet ever saw coming, we discover that, yes, the cops who were dicks to Jesse are indeed in league with Whelan. Whelan paid them to help mess with his opponent. They helped get an office shut down. They canceled some security detail that led to a riot at the guy’s last riot that gave Whelan a boost in the polls. Somehow, two run-of-the-mill cops can do this. I don’t know how. But here we are.

I don’t fully understand Whelan’s beef here. Like, we get it he probably likes the idea of being in power. I’m sure being a senator helps him ascend someday to the presidency, but why does he want the power? Does he plan to start a war with Russia? How about the Middle East? Does he not like woke ideology? Is he friends with Elon Musk? What’s the end goal here? He tells the cops that he has something big planned, but what is that?

I guess he does have some war ambitions. He’s got a giant bazooka called “the viper” which he says is the latest in the line of surface-to-surface heat-seeking rocket technology. He then points out a car sitting way the fuck over there that he blows up with the rocket launcher. But either he is a really good shot with a bazooka or that car is left on and running because I’m not sure how it heat-seeked anything, but what do I know?

Whelan gestures vaguely at a plot to sell weapons, these weapons in particular to a bunch of countries and regions like South America, the Middle East, Africa, and so forth. If he gets to the Senate, he’ll have the connections to make good on that plan. He says there is one loose thread that needs to be snipped – Jesse. He says that he was Jesse and Walt’s commanding officer in ‘Nam. If there is anyone who will be able to divine what’s going on (like, seriously, there’s no reason to think that Jesse will figure out anything based on what I’ve seen so far, but I guess he’s magical or something), it will be Jesse. He’s got skills, see? Skills like thinking real hard about stuff. Oh, and Walt told him stuff, or at least Whelan assumes as much. He doesn’t really know for sure but surely Walt told him stuff.

Anyway, he wants the cops to eliminate Jesse for him because his other goons have disappointed him greatly. The plan is simple… They need to find Jesse and kill him so they can all get rich or they will all end up in jail. Oh, and what’s the cops’ reason for being on the take from Whelan? They look to quit being regular ol’ cops and become the head of Whelan’s security detail where they think they will make “8 figures” of money.

I kind of feel like this is one of those movies that got cobbled together by a guy who knew some guys who could get a screenplay turned into a movie. This was not written by Hilton-Jacobs. Instead, it was by a guy named John Knoerle. There was a credit for “additional dialog by” but for the most part the plot belongs to Knoerle. This was the only screenplay he ever wrote. That’s pretty evident here.

This whole movie feels like someone who knows the hallmarks of this era of action movies. Like, he knows that the action guys need to be Vietnam vets. He knows cops in LA or assholes. He has people in power who can’t be trusted. There’s a little bit of dirt and grime on every character, even Jesse. Jesse did some seriously dark stuff in the war. Walt is kind of a sleaze. Jana dates guys with money and tries getting ahead as a model by dating those guys. Whelan wants to watch the world burn while saying people should vote for him because he wants peace in the world. You get it.

There are a lot of things that the writer just doesn’t seem like he understands. How in the world would cops be able to disrupt a political campaign rally? How would cops be able to rise to security detail chiefs for government officials? How would a single guy with just a few individual words that don’t have anything in common with each other be able to figure out the plan Whelan has? This is why I say this feels like a movie that is just cobbled together with hallmarks of what makes an action movie in 1991 an action movie. It doesn’t take long before you start asking questions that the appropriate answers would derail and completely make the movie something that it couldn’t recover from.

Anyway, Jesse goes to see Karen Black who runs a hippie head shop. She knew Walt and talks to Jesse about their shared friend, but she doesn’t really know anything that can help Jesse. She’s just here to have a name that can help sell this movie to video stores.

When Jesse gets to work at Gold’s Gym (because of course that’s the gym he’d work at), he’s called by his secretary to there are a couple guys waiting to see him. These are some of the goons who work for Whelan. He realizes that his girl’s voice quivers ever so slightly which tells him that she’s got a gun to her head. He gets away but… Why wouldn’t the secretary immediately go to the cops the moment they take off to chase after Jesse? They didn’t kill her, so these guys should be fairly fucked. I mean, maybe they killed her later, but this is a major unforced error by these guys. Anyway, I need to stop trying to make sense of this movie.

Jesse calls Detective Russo (Z’Dar) to say someone’s trying to kill him. He doesn’t realize Russo is on the take and he has no one else to try to turn to. Jesse gives Russo Jana’s address so they can meet there later tonight. Russo calls Whelan to give him that same address so they can ambush Jesse.

However, that fails. When Whelan learns that Jesse is still alive and kicking, he says it’s time to do it the right way.

A giant portion of the second act of this movie is Jesse trying to find out what Walt knew. Jesse is being followed by goons and/or cops. Jessie finds someone who knew Walt and talks to them but does not really get too much aside from finding out where Walt’s chop shop is located. Jesse figures whatever WAlt apparently had that led to his death would be found there. One guy Jesse went to talk to and who had the address of the chop shop is visited by Whelan’s goons just after he left and that guy was tossed out of his apartment’s window to his death. That poor defenestrated guy was Clyde, Karen Black’s cousin. Jesse tells her that each person who knew Walt is being killed one by one and she may just be the next person to die. She’s too stoned to care and doesn’t believe what Jesse’s saying. Her nonchalant attitude toward everything going on seems like she will be killed, but she actually defends herself nicely when Whelan sends a guy to kill her.

Here’s another part where a little extra work on the screenplay would do this movie a world of good. Walt goes to Jesse and says “Hey man, there’s a lot of shit coming your way, and you will be the next target of bad guys!” That would be fine if the goons only ever target just Walt and Jesse, but they don’t. They kill or threaten to kill all these other guys. On top of that, Whelan himself says that Jesse is the only guy they need to worry about. So why go kill Clyde or Karen Black or anyone else? The easy fix for this is to simply say that there’s a list of people who need to be dealt with, but the biggest target on the list should be Jesse because he’s smart, he’s got skills, he knows kung fu… You get it.

Jana unlocks the last remaining mystery for Jesse. When Walt went to Jesse to tell him that bad shit is going down, he mentioned a “star” as part of what information he could share before he died. As she reads Walt’s obituary, she mentions he was awarded the Bronze Star for his time in Vietnam. That must be the star in question and it is where he hid a key to open a vault where he figures the disk with all the good stuff about what’s going on is hidden. She warns him to not go to the funeral home where Walt’s body is kept for burial because whoever is after him will know he’ll go there too.

Jesse is no dummy. He knows it would be dangerous for him to go there normally, so he sneaks into the funeral parlor after hours, finds Walt’s body, and takes the bronze star off his suit. In the ribbon of the medal, he finds the key to the vault. Jana drives Jesse to Walt’s chop shop to open the vault. Well, I thought it would be a vault, but it isn’t. It was a locked glove compartment in a random car. But what he took from the Bronze Star was not a car key… It was a tiny key that looked like a lock box key. I’m old enough to know what keys were used for glove compartments in cars of that era. they were usually either the door or the ignition key.

Fuck it.

They see all the juicy bits about Whelan on the disk and take it to Jana’s reporter friend. He admits it is compelling stuff about Whelan but it might need a little more independent fact-checking. However, Vietnam War stories start to merge together at this point. Jesse says there was a mission to go to a munitions dump and, as Whelan explained in his earlier scene about defeating enemies, it all went south. The only three people who survived were Whelan, Jesse, and Walt. Jesse spent three months in a coma after being rescued and it’s very likely Whelan left Jesse and Walt for dead to high-tail it out of there with a chopper that was called in to pick everyone up. Everyone apparently knew that Whelan was a known opportunist and that mission and what happened got him the Silver Star awarded to him for bravery and he’s been using that ever since to gain more and more power.

Oh and the team name of that group in Vietnam was “Quiet Fire” so we also get a title drop.

This connective tissue is the best thing the movie has done during this entire runtime. The motivation behind Whelan makes sense now. He’s just a bad dude and untrustworthy. We can kind of understand why Jesse is still a little bothered by his time in Vietnam. And Walt’s desire to bring down Whelan makes so much sense. Sadly, it came so late in the movie, I’ve long checked out.

Think about it. If we didn’t just see Whelan as a turdy little fuck, but actually saw him grease palms, scratch backs, and work with people who are wanting to subvert democracy or cause material harm to people, that would be so much more compelling of a villain. Instead, we just end up with this weasel of a senate candidate. See what I mean about how additional passes for the script could benefit this movie greatly?

So we’re really getting to the big finale of this movie and I guess things get bumped up quite a bit in terms of tension…? Eh. Anyway, seeing how Whelan’s own guys have failed him consistently throughout the course of this plot, and the cops aren’t really doing everything they probably could do to help, he decides to call in a couple of actual professionals named Hector and Jax. These two ladies were played by bodybuilders Dorothy Herndon and Laura Vukov. They do not mess around. The first thing they do is kill Whelan’s weasely assistant for being a constant fuck up, and then they go to a fashion show that Jana is modeling at and start shooting up the place. As Jesse and Jana escape the scene, it’s revealed that Jana caught a bullet in the head from the killers.

So pretty much everyone around Jesse is dead so what’s an action man in the 80s and 90s to do? He arms up with ninja stars and all sorts of shit and decides to take the fight to the prospective senator. Whelan has his two cop goons and his two professional assassin dudettes go after Jesse. For the most part, this big climax is fairly standard action stuff. He lures the cops into the boiler room and he plays cat and mouse with them. He eventually is able to dispatch both of them using his special forces and kung fu skills. Z’Dar gets electrocuted by being kicked into a power grid thing and the other cop is stabbed with a little baby knife. When Jax starts shooting at Jesse, he just launches a throwing star into her forehead. Hector just gets punched out because I guess him being a guy is stronger than a literal bodybuilder.

Now it’s just Jesse and Whelan. Jesse chases Whelan up the building’s stairwell. Whelan eventually gets to the door of the roof where he holds Jesse at gunpoint. Surprise, surprise, he’s out of bullets. Jesse says something about it being a Smith & Wesson and he’s had his six shots evoking a Dirty Harry thing. Whelan gets to a helicopter and Jesse runs up to it and sticks an explosive to it and Whelan gets blowed up real good.

And that’s how it ends. Of course, there will be lots of questions about how democracy will survive a man with such a criminal streak to him and someone who will do pretty awful shit to gain power… Oh… Wait… This just in… Oh. Oh no.

Okay, so I just found out that apparently our country will likely look past any wrongdoing this literal sack of turds does as long as he says and stands up for the things that a somehow large portion of the population wants to believe in. America is… Woof. We’re fucked, Enemaniacs.

This movie is… Not very good. Oh, you didn’t get that’s how I felt about it from the previous 4000 words in this review? Yeah. There are some quaint and sort of fun things that you could poke at about it being a bad or very low budget film, but it’s not a fun bad. I wouldn’t recommend it for a bad movie night. It’s not offensively bad. It’s just bad. The entire middle section of the movie is kind of boring and the end isn’t exactly clever or well-choreographed in terms of people getting what’s coming to them. I mean, sure it was a helicopter that lifted Whelan toward power in ‘Nam and it’s a helicopter that will serve as his coffin in the end. That’s something, I guess, but it’s not super compelling by any stretch of the imagination.

Next time, we return to the Philippines for another Eddie Romero flick. This time, it’s for the 1971 horror flick Beast of the Yellow Night starring John Ashley. Also, don’t forget to check out tomorrow’s new episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series as Nurse Disembaudee and I scour the grimy streets of London in the swinging 60s with the giallo-inspired thriller Night After Night After Night. I sure hope you head on over to YouTube, Vimeo, or the B-Movie Enema Roku app to check that episode out. Until then, if you ain’t gonna have a totally Quiet Fire, can you at least turn it down so the rest of us can get some sleep around here?