The Action Scene is a column that explores the construction of action set pieces in order to deepen appreciation for and spark discussion about action cinema.
“It was clear that PM weren’t attempting art.”
This remark prefaces interviews conducted by the sadly defunct publication Hopes & Fears with various directors and stars who worked with PM Entertainment, an independent film company that churned out a steady stream of largely direct-to-video movies and television episodes—most famously within the action genre—between the late 1980s and early 2000s. Watching the operatic tour-de-force opening of the PM film Intent to Kill (1992), however, one might doubt the statement’s accuracy. The extraordinary set piece features squealing tires, spraying glass, and slow-motion gunplay, all against a jet-black sky dotted by the vaporous glow of street lamps. Blue-hued, low-key lighting cuts through night air thick with fog and gun smoke, sustaining a noirish, dreamlike mood that hits peak ethereality when a car combusts, unfurling plumes of fire. The film’s cinematographer, Ken Blakey, has cited King of New York (1990) and Deep Cover (1992) as inspirations for his subsequent PM project Maximum Force (1992), but this influence was already writ large in Intent to Kill. Even more than Maximum Force—which film critic R. Emmet Sweeney describes as being “lit like a Delacroix painting with pools of inky blackness”—Intent to Kill’s first action scene is a marvel of impasto expressionism, an ecstatic dose of pure, capital-S style. Visually and viscerally, the artistry of this scene is evident.
Yet such a scene emerged from an intensely market-oriented production context that reinforces skepticism about artistic intent. Founded by Richard Pepin and Joseph Merhi (the eponymous “P” and “M”), PM began small: a handful of acquaintances operating out of a two-room office in Los Angeles, their starting capital comprising little more than Pepin’s 16mm camera and the proceeds Merhi made from selling his pizza business. At that point called “City Lights Entertainment,” Pepin and Merhi helmed a handful of microbudget, direct-to-video projects like Hollywood in Trouble (1986) and Mayhem (1989). In 1989, they fell out with a third partner, Ronald L. Gilchrist, and caught the eye of HBO, which saw in these up-and-coming journeymen a means of tapping the growing VHS market. Now rebranded as PM, they struck a deal with HBO and expanded their operations. Nevertheless, PM’s budgets typically averaged around just $350,000, a fraction of what Hollywood studios were spending on their action pictures. “Working with really low budgets, as a director, forced me to learn how to shoot really fast,” director and repeated PM collaborator Richard W. Munchkin shared with Hopes & Fears. “You had to design your day with speed in mind. It wasn’t about ‘What is the best way to tell the story,’ it was ‘how can I shoot 11 pages in one day.’”
Above: Jeff Wincott in Deadly Bet (1992). Below: Anna Nicole Smith in Skyscraper (1996).
This ethos of do-what-you-have-to-under-the-circumstances reflected PM’s approach in general. “Everything at PM was driven by the market,” Munchkin noted. This impetus is apparent in the way the company borrowed aggressively from the trends of the day, such as the post-Bloodsport (1989) fad for kickboxing movies and the success of Die Hard (1988), which inspired films like the Ring of Fire trilogy (1991-1995), Deadly Bet (1992), and Skyscraper (1996). Quantity became as much of a guiding principle as quality, if not more so. Over the course of a decade, PM produced more than 100 films and television episodes; per Munchkin, the company’s head of sales would take the pulse of a given market and report back with mercurial quota mandates like “less nudity, more action” or “more sex, less violence.” Action, however, was the company’s chief selling point, from which developed the rule of thumb that “somebody had to either be shooting, chasing, or fighting every seven minutes.” Added Munchkin, “And, if it was quicker than that, even better.”
PM’s compressed, more-and-quickly workflow is legible in its action films, which comprised the bulk of the company’s output. There’s a lot of action, which often digresses shamelessly from the main plot. In Intent to Kill, a kickboxing match randomly appears between a scene of two characters making plans for dinner and them going out (“what was that all about?” asks one of them after the fight), and the meal itself is conveniently interrupted by gun-toting gangsters collecting on a debt from one of the patrons, occasioning even more action. With PM, a certain formal crudeness betrays a functional sensibility. Footage is reused across films, such as images of a jewelry store heist in Ring of Fire II: Blood and Steel (1993) and Ice (1994); camera setups are often static and repetitive; and stylistic “goofs” repeatedly crop up, from boom mics protruding into shots to the mattress catching a stuntman’s fall remaining visible at the bottom of the frame.
Intent to Kill (Charles T. Kanganis, 1992).
Within this norm of films that often feel rickety and inert even when jam-packed with incident, the vibrancy of Intent to Kill’s introductory set piece stands out. But it is not a total anomaly. The stylized lighting, the vigorous gunplay, the exploding cars—all are established elements of the PM template (which itself drew heavily upon more mainstream films). The Intent to Kill opening is not so much a departure as a refinement of the PM style—a style that, in both conception and execution, was always unabashedly geared toward the market. Viewed alongside PM’s production context and the rest of the company’s output, the aesthetic pleasures of Intent to Kill become intelligible as byproducts of a market mentality; the thick expressionism, though gorgeous, also embodies the company’s prevailing ethos of “more,” dialing up to eleven an established PM “look” without expending the resources or taking the risk to create something different.
And yet, the scene is gorgeous, and precisely because of its muchness. The expressionism, though on one level simply an intensification of the familiar, works precisely because of this intensification. The unexpected synergy between art and commerce finds an analogue in PM’s approach to politics. “PM never had any desire or care about social good,” Munchkin insisted. “It wasn’t about promoting female action stars or Asian American action stars. It was always about the bottom line: can I sell it?” Both in theory and to a significant degree in practice, this philosophy meant parroting the racism and sexism of mainstream media, because these were the things that sold. But as an omnivorously mercenary enterprise, PM was also indiscriminate with its sensationalism. It didn’t adopt any specific platform, but, rather, capitalized upon whatever controversial talking points and cultural anxieties were in the air. The ensuing films were often viscerally compelling in the directness with which they expressed social ills. In one scene from Intent to Kill, a cop sneeringly interrogates a rape victim, taunting inconsistencies in her testimony and making demeaning remarks about how she is dressed. Almost parodically on-the-nose, the moment was likely conceived in large part with sensationalism in mind, but the result is a jolting frankness that feels almost radical.
Intent to Kill (1992).
This bluntness regarding feminist “issues” is central to Intent to Kill. From portraying virtually all male characters as possessive, ineffectual, and/or outright monstrous, to depicting female solidarity in the aftermath of abuse, the film once more takes an established PM template (in this case, the forthright, opportunistic invocation of hot-button topics) to potent heights. Nowhere is this more evident than in the film’s opening credits sequence. Comprising slow-motion close-ups of different parts of a woman’s body as she dons makeup and sundry suggestive garments, these credits convey the idea of gender as performance. Visually, the fetishistic fragmenting of the female body reproduces the trope of the male gaze, but, here, the woman (Traci Lords) is also presented as being in control: she is putting things on, constructing her own image, choosing what to display and what to hide (including her badge and gun, which link her to law enforcement but also thematize her strategically concealed strength). Her preparations are for a sting operation, for which she is going undercover as a prostitute, but they also anticipate the rest of the film, during which she both is objectified by men and weaponizes her desirability as a tactic for navigating a misogynistic system. Formally and narratively, Intent to Kill evokes the male gaze only to subvert it, implicating the viewer in the very systems of objectification and subjugation faced by the women in—and beyond—the film.
It’s a cogent political vision that, while visibly extending PM’s market-driven modus operandi, also seems to transcend it; in the words of the Hopes & Fears interviewer, “restrictions became virtues.” Though the company’s desperate, cash- and time-strapped grind was in many ways an obstacle for creativity, it was also a crucible, from which issued forth indelible flashes of inspiration.