Ha ha y’all, it’s Burl, here with a little
Texas action for you! No, it’s not Action U.S.A., or 2020 Texas Gladiators
(as apt as that would be in this pestilential year, ha ha!), or Silent Rage, but a minor and
largely forgotten morgenstern called Getting
Even! It's early work from the little director of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, ha ha!
Edward Albert from When Time Ran Out and Galaxy of Terror stars as Tag Taggar, a millionaire industrialist from the Lone
Star State who doubles, we see in the opening sequence, as the leader of a commando
band made up of his friends and employees! Ha ha, it’s almost like the red states wanted their own Buckaroo Banzai, but instead of a rock star / brain surgeon / physicist-hipster with an alliterative name, they came up with
a businessman / mercenary / good ol’ boy with an alliterative name!
Tag’s mission in Afghanistan or wherever
involves securing several canisters of poison gas, which he then brings back to
Texas and places inside a glass cupboard! Meanwhile Tag Taggart’s business
rival, a big, robust, evil industrialist called King Kenderson, who seethes with bitter
jealousy at every Tag Tagger success, plots to steal the deadly chemical! Since the substance, in its bright yellow cannisters, is kept in full view in the glass cupboard, his operatives succeed easily! Ha ha!
Joe Don Baker, from Fletch, The Living Daylights, and Tomorrow Never Dies, plays King Kenderson, and his performance is one of the picture’s
great assets! He manages to make King a properly hateful bad guy in a very
human and understandable way, while injecting his character with some humour
and the general sense of having a good time! Audrey Landers, meanwhile, plays
Paige Starson, an old flame of Tag Taggert’s, who also represents some kind of
government law enforcement agency! While her performance is nothing special,
the character, in a welcome change from most 80s action, is presented as
competent and intelligent, and is deeply involved in the action! Ha ha, by the
end, after figuring out some allergy-based clues, she’s piloting a helicopter
while firing a machine gun out the door of it while the putative hero is
hanging helplessly off a building!
The picture spins its narrative wheels for
a good chunk of the middle act as Tag Taggartt and Paige Starson try to figure
out who stole the gas! Since we, the audience, have known from the beginning, a
certain impatience sets in! Luckily we’re still jazzed from the scene where
King Kenderson sends his girlfriend in to test the gas on a hamster, and, after
an accident cracks the hamster’s terrarium, can only watch in hysterical horror
as she and her assistant melt down into slag puddles! Ha ha, this part reminded
me of the more elaborate meltdown in Spasms,
which involves Al Waxman and the venom of a giant snake! (An interesting fact: Waxman,
as you know, played The King of Kensington, whereas this picture features King
Kenderson!)
There are a few faces lurking about that
are familiar from various Texas horror pictures! Blue Deckert from The Outing plays the ill-fated Kurt, Tag
Tagertt’s good friend whose melted corpse is found hanging from a tree! Caroline
Williams from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre part 2 plays the equally ill-fated lady scientist; Dan Shackleford from Deadly Blessing is Raoul, a henchman;
and Tommy Splittgerber from Race With the
Devil plays a dimwitted gun shop owner! We also get an appearance from Woody
Watson of Eddie Macon’s Run!
Except for the narrative glaciation of the
second act, the picture moves briskly enough! It could use more meltdowns, and
one eagerly anticipates King Kenderson having his own run-in with the gas, but
we wait for this in vain! Still, the movie punches a little above its weight in
its action scenes, and there’s some impressive stunt work along the way! Getting Even is no masterpiece, not even
close, but it’s a night out (or, these days, I should say strictly a night in), and I give it two exploding
hamsters!
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