Bullet Points: Venice Underground

Auto play is a feature most streaming services have in today’s modern world. Auto play is likely the number one reason many a television series have been binged for hours. Auto play is also to blame for making me aware that 2005’s Venice Underground existed.

I had just wrapped up my viewing of Max Havoc: Ring of Fire and while I took a few final notes for my review, Tubi’s algorithm must have thought… “oh, you like crappy movies with a 3 rating on IMDb, here you go…”

And Venice Underground started to play and who is the first actor to appear on camera? None other than Ed Lauter of Death Wish 3 fame. This is when I thought, “thanks Tubi, I had no idea Ed Lauter was in a movie called Venice Underground. I don’t have time to watch it right now, but I’ll be sure to add it to My List.”

• A Promising Start: The movie had a cold open, we see the exterior of LAPD headquarters, cut inside and see a newspaper headline… Venice Boardwalk Crippled By Gang Shootings” …the man reading the paper is Captain John Sullivan played by the aforementioned Ed Lauter. Captain Sullivan is about to get chewed out by the mayor and it is clear that if he wants to keep his job he needs to fix the Venice situation.
• Outside the Box: Sullivan recalls that Sgt. Frank Mills (Randall Batinkoff, Streetwalkin’) had a radical idea that might just be useful here, so he calls “Millsy” in to officially pitch him on the idea… Mills wants to recruit a group of Police Academy cadets that have street smarts and don’t act like cops… something imperative if they want to infiltrate the Venice underground. Mills shares the dossiers with Sullivan and we get a brief bio on each of them… first there’s Gary (Edward Furlong), he was once in a band but his best friend/lead singer died of a heroin overdose and Gary decided he wanted to wage a war on drugs… there’s also surfer chick Tyler (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe)… Jack (Nicholas Gonzalez) the boxer, he had a brother who got mixed up with the gangs and also got dead… Samantha is up next and Mills seems really excited about her and her knowledge of the club scene… Last but not least is Danny played by Hallmark’s Eric Mabius. Being a cop is in Danny’s blood, his father was a police chief with the NYPD and Danny is apparently a natural born leader.

• Out of the Cold: I should mention that everything I just recapped happened before the opening credits. And speaking of the opening credits… they felt like they went on for an eternity and I was really tempted to check if there was anything else on My List I could be watching… but would any of those options have Ed Lauter?? So I continued on…
• Who’s Your Daddy?: The movie skips ahead six months and we find out that Samantha is screwing both Mills and Danny and is possibly pregnant… but that’s not the only romance happening as part of Real World Venice Gary and Tyler are an item… so you can imagine how upset Tyler is when Gary decides to trail a potential new player in the Venice drug scene and it results in him being killed by a mysterious man with a gold plated gun… ok, a member of the team has been murdered, it is time to unleash some serious vengeance on the Venice underground and bring Gary’s killer to justice! Right?!? Right!?!?! No… the movie just plods along with romantic subplots, the most boring police work and more and more characters being introduced… James Duval’s character Lucious Jackson doesn’t show up until the third act!

My Ed Lauter loyalty cost me 93 minutes of my life (not including the Tubi commercial breaks). What could I have done with that 93 minutes? I could have watched Death Wish 3 again and had a minute to spare.

If you have a minute or two to spare, how about checking out these Bonus Bullet Points…

• Familiar Faces: There were plenty of familiar faces in Venice Underground like Danny Trejo of Champions and Machete fame, who played the head of the south side gang, Papi… UFC Hall of Famer Tito Ortiz plays Poptop (not to be confused with Mop Top), Papi’s right hand man… Mark Boone Junior plays record producer/money launder Wexler Reed. You may remember MBJ from his work in Vampires or 2 Fast 2 Furious.
• Dated Technology: Venice Underground features disposable cameras and flip phones.
• VU2: At the end of the film, a Venice Underground sequel is teased. Thankfully it did not happen, but seriously fuck them for even putting the possibility of more of this shit out in the world and having the audacity to think anyone wanted more.