Weep for poor Billy Zane, but for the grace of god his path may be yours. Do you remember the young Billy, his life so full of promise? Scarcely more than a kid when he scored a key role on the then-riding-high Twin Peaks? What of his parts in Tombstone or Memphis Belle? No, he was never quite a leading man - the failure of The Phantom saw to that - he was one of Hollywood's more reliable side players, a role that kept him busy through to a key part in Titanic. Sadly the '97 mega-hit would be the last major film part Zane would ever appear in...

I write this from my hotel room at this year's edition of the American Film Market in LA. Of the three big markets in the film world - the events where films are bought and sold for global distribution - the AFM is known amongst regular attendees as the market where, if we're being honest, the most low budget trash appears. You know the stuff I mean... films knocked out quick and cheap for the DVD bargain bins or late night cable television or to pander to the very strange audiences in Europe who have made David Hasselhoff such a major star. And while Zane has been banished from the big screen for reasons I don't personally understand, in this world he is the undisputed king.

Titanic came in 1997, a mere twelve years ago.  In the time since Zane has appeared in a whopping fifty seven productions. A small handful are guest spots or recurrent characters on TV but the rest? All of it low budget trash. Whether he's in this world by choice or necessity there's no doubt that Zane is in it wholeheartedly, averaging more than five of these low budget turkeys every year. Some of them - such as the ill-fated production of Ed Wood's final, unfilmed script I Woke Up Early The Day I Died - are projects taken on out of passion. Others - such as Turkish production Kurtlar Vidisi, in which he plays an American soldier complicit in a Jewish scheme to harvest and sell organs from dead and dying Arab soldiers - were done out of seeming insanity. But most are just jobs for paychecks. 

And one of the lowest paychecks of them all, I'm certain, comes from the film which is the actual point of this post - the hysterically awful Journey To Promethea, offered for sale at this edition of the AFM, in which Zane plays a badly wigged king trying to kill the child prophesied to destroy him and his reign.  This is trash of the highest order, Zane clearly knows it, and the crazily over the top delivery he gives to his hackneyed lines is a thing of beauty.  Thank you Billy. You may enjoy for yourself here.