Burl reviews Red Scorpion 2! (1994)

 

Ha ha and hi hi, it’s Burl! When you have a lot of VHS tapes, as I do, sometimes you discover a movie you’ve had around for years, unwatched and completely forgotten! I unearthed just such a movie the other day, and while it was easy to see why I’d been ignoring it, once I’d read the copy on the back of the box, I knew I had to give it a look! The movie is Red Scorpion 2, and, as though to atone for the fact that the original Red Scorpion (which I’ve never seen) was evidently shot in South African territory during apartheid, this one was shot in Canada and has as its bad guy a white supremacist cult leader jerk who’s masterminding a series of race-based massacres!

As I’ve often said, in reviews for movies like Malone and Day of the Survivalist and Avenging Force, I always like action movies in which the bad guys are right-wing maniacs, and better still if they’re white supremacists because it’s such a pleasure to see people like that get violently killed by some action hero or another! And our action hero here is Nick Stone, played by Matt McColm, one of the alley cops in They Live! Ha ha, it’s nice to see that he’s gone from the side of the alien fascists to leading an anti-fascist commando squad!

John Savage, a long way from The Deer Hunter and Do The Right Thing, plays Andrew Kendrick, a racist with a strange manner of speech and presidential aspirations, who has assembled a devoted cult and a fighting force of the world’s worst shots! Ha ha, as we see in the climax, none of these clowns could hit the broad side of a barn from ten paces if their lives depended on it! Savage hams it up most extravagantly as the leader of The Citadel, who can set off race-based massacres at the push of a button! We see one of these in the picture’s opening moments, and it’s especially horrific to watch in this day and age!

The hierarchy on the anti-fascist team is as follows: none other than Michael Ironside, beloved from pictures like Extreme Prejudice, Total Recall and McBain, is some kind of colonel, the sort of guy who tells people what to do but then mostly stays behind in command headquarters! Below him is Jennifer Rubin from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, who plays the no-nonsense head commando lady! Below her we find our hero, Stone, and then the rest of the motley squad: a slapheaded computer nerd whose catch phrase is “You have beautiful eyes,” played by Paul Ben-Victor from Metro; a black commando played by Réal Andrews from Wild Thing, who at one point busts into one of the colour-cult’s stupid meetings and calls all the crackers in attendance “eggs with legs;” and a cowboy-hatted fellow who’s just rednecky enough to briefly infiltrate The Citadel before he gets caught and chained to a wall!

George Touliatos from Prom Night plays Grigori, the aphorism-spouting Russian mentor whose job it is to whip this squad into a team! Tethered rock climbing for hours on end is his prescription, ha ha, and it seems only fitting that he meets his end while engaged in just such an activity himself, though he doesn’t die before gasping out one last dumb axiom! Jerry Wasserman from Shoot To Kill plays an investigative journalist who is captured by The Citadel and forced to play “Kendrick’s Roulette” with the his fellow prisoner, the redneck!

Duncan Fraser from The Fly II and Watchers (and Malone, come to think of it!) plays Mr. Benjamin, the racists’ in-house tech specialist, and he gets a fine send-off: shot, set aflame, defenestrated, whereupon he rolls off three different sloping roofs, plummets down into a shed filled with explosives, and has time to emit one last strangled cry before blowing to flinders! Ha ha! Kendrick himself goes out in an even more fiery fashion: beaten, stabbed, then overwhelmed by a fireball as he bellows something about becoming one with the wind!

You’ll gather from this rather scattershot review that Red Scorpion 2 is something of a curio! It’s not a good picture, that much is true, but it’s an amusing one, and, unfortunately, a timely one too! Very few viewers who lived through the years 2016 through 2020 will be able to watch Kendrick conduct one of his rallies and not be reminded of a certain venal oaf who was the President of the United States during that time! The racist cells across the country ready to do Kendrick’s terrible bidding do not seem like such a fantastical concept these days, so it’s extra satisfying to see these people blown away by the doughty Red Scorpion fighting force!

Still, ha ha, we can’t pretend the picture is good! It’s a fairly unique mix of funny and horrifying, but most of the action scenes are pretty half-hearted, the acting is highly variable, and of course it’s all about as dumb as an old plaid shirt! I recommend a viewing nonetheless, and am pleased to give Red Scorpion two little red scorpion tattoos!

Burl reviews Black Cobra! (1987)

 

Greetings to all, it’s Burl here with another review! Ha ha, and this is a strange one: a movie that isn’t any kind of official remake, but an unofficial adaptation that makes no bones about its status as a cinematic remora! Of course there are a lot of these movies in international cinema, from the Turkish Star Wars on down, and endless Italian examples but usually they purloin from big hit movies instead of, say, the Sly Stallone vehicle Cobra! Ha ha! Yes, the picture I’m talking about today is the Italian-made, Fred Williamson-starring, hyper-literally titled Black Cobra!

The Hammer, whom we remember from The New Gladiators, itself the Italian clone of The Running Man, plays Robert, aka Black Cobra, a homicide cop whose unconventional methods drive his captain crazy! We see his moves early in the picture when, instead of a supermarket as in Cobra, some nogoodniks have taken over a swimming pool, of all places! Meanwhile there’s a crazed murder gang with a profound love of studded leather, led by big-faced Bruno Bilotta from Warrior of the Lost World! In the course of their everyday murder activities, Bilotta has his picture taken by fashion photographer Miss Trumbo, played by Eva Grimaldi, who was in something called The Fine Art of Love: Mine Ha Ha! Based on that title, I supposed I ought to see that one some day!

The murder gang decides that the hospitalized Miss Trumbo must be killed, and as step one of their plan to infiltrate the medical institution, they wrap a chain around some poor motorist’s neck and drag him to his bloody demise! Step two involves actually visiting the hospital, but Black Cobra arrives there too, and rides gurneys around the place while blasting away at the murder gang! Black Cobra manages to save Miss Trumbo from the murder gang, but only just, and so he decides that the best way he can protect her is if she comes and lives with him!

At home, Black Cobra is utterly dominated by his cat Purvis, which terrorizes him with its constant demands for colour-coded cat food! (Could this be a little tribute to The Long Goodbye? Ha ha!) But even Purvis must adapt to a new routine when Miss Trumbo arrives, and one somewhat nervously expects the movie to become an Odd Couple riff, with Miss Trumbo complaining about Black Cobra’s homemaking habits! But this doesn’t come to pass! Instead, happily, the murder gang attacks again and people are blasted by Black Cobra’s big gun or the grenades he will occasionally toss!

Meanwhile Black Cobra has a partner whose teenage daughter is kidnapped by the violence gang, and their wish is to trade her for Miss Trumbo! But Black Cobra is having none of it, informing his partner that “I’d go and get her even if it was Santa Claus’s daughter!” Ha ha, I’m sure Santa is happy to hear that! The climax is decently well done for a cheap little rip-off picture, I suppose, and includes a fake-out or two; but the gang leader’s demise is nothing close to the spectacle offered in the Stallone picture!

Those are the things you miss in these rip-offs! Cobra drove a big black tank-like vintage car; Black Cobra drives a shitbox Ford! The violence gang in Cobra chanted and banged axes together; the clowns in Black Cobra just sit around moping in their abandoned factory hideout! Ha ha, they don’t even keep the furnaces blazing like the guys in Cobra did! On the other hand, neither Cobra nor any other movie I know of can boast a collision between a Chevy Blazer and a windsurfer, ha ha, but Black Cobra sure can! For that, and for all its other little peculiarities, I give it one tin of blue cat food and a half a tin of red!

Burl reviews Gymkata! (1985)

 

Hi-ya and yakmalla, it’s Burl, here to review a well-loved classic of le bad cinema! I’ve owned a big-box MGM/UA VHS tape of this entry for a long time, but until the other night had never bothered to sit down and watch the thing! (I’ve also never watched Ninja III: The Domination, another legendarily enjoyable bad movie released by MGM/UA, but then again I don’t own a copy of that one! One day I’ll catch up to it, though!) And, though you may already have guessed it, the picture I’d like to talk about today is Gymkata!

Yes, ha ha, Gymkata! I think we all know this movie! Evidently, in the wake of the 1984 Olympics, someone, somewhere, decided that gymnast Kurt Thomas should become an action hero, and developed a story in which he becomes the master of a gymnastic martial art called gymkata! (I don’t recall them ever saying the word “gymkata” aloud in the movie, but that’s neither here nor there, I suppose!) And the big secret of gymkata is to be sure there’s a bar or a pole or a pommel horse close by so that you can swing around it and kick people in the head! And if there happens to be no athletic equipment close at hand, you can do a bunch of flips, somersaults, and cartwheels! Ha ha, economy of movement is evidently not a central precept of this particular defensive art!

The plot is, quite simply, a crazy nonsense! The little nation of Parmistan, famed for its citizens' love of hard cheese and their constant cries of “Yakmalla,” is also known for its harsh immigration policy: every newcomer must undertake the inevitably fatal “Game,” which consists of being chased across the countryside by commandos and negotiating such obstacles as a steep gorge, a sheer cliff, a confusing forest, and a town populated exclusively by maniacs who keep a carved-stone pommel horse in their square! The US wants to put a secret Star Wars radar base in the country, but diplomacy has failed to achieve this end, and straight force is out of the question!

Clearly a secret agent-gymnast is the hero required for this mission, and the government, represented here by Edward Michael Bell from The Premonition, has one on standby! It’s Jonathan Cabot, a hoppy-jumpy dwarf unburdened by personality, who’s willing to master The Game by learning new techniques from a series of teachers! These techniques include flip-wrestling and walking up the stairs on his hands! He also receives counsel from the Princess of Parmistan herself, played by the comely Filipina Tetchie Agbayani, well known from The Money Pit!

Once he arrives in Parmistan and begins to play The Game, Cabot finds enemies around every corner! Richard Norton, who did about a million low-rent action pictures and also showed up in Mad Max: Fury Road, plays Commander Zamir, in charge of both maintaining The Game’s rules and subverting The Game’s rules! Bob Schott from Vamp and Head of the Family plays Thorg, a rival player determined to kill Cabot for his propensity to spring about like a leprechaun!

And then there’s The Khan, the country’s leading shouter of “Yakmalla!” and a personage unaccountably played by muscle-bound homunculus Buck Kartalian, from Please Don’t Eat My Mother and The Outlaw Josey Wales! Ha ha, he wears a big fur hat and plays The Khan like a conventioneer at a costume party, and seems never to stop shouting “Yakmalla!” He’s a good guy, as it turns out!

Robert Clouse, who directed The Pack, was in charge of all this lunacy, and indeed one must admit that the fights, as dumb as they are, contain some impressive athleticism from Kurt Thomas! I liked that there was some 80s action gore sprinkled here and there, which is something that always improves a picture; and of course the convenient, horselaugh-inducing presence of the pommel horse and other gymnastic necessities provides plenty of entertainment value! The performances stink, and there’s a backbreaking cape of stupidity draped across the whole thing, but that’s to be expected! I’m glad I watched it, I suppose, and I look forward to Ninja III! In the meantime I give Gymkata one and a half reverse faces! Yakmalla!

Burl reviews Hell Squad! (1984)

Budda-budda-budda it’s Burl, here to review one of the many commando girl movies they made in the 70s and 80s! You’ve got The Muthers, Commando Girls, Cover Girl Models, your Andy Sidaris epics, and then this one, among the liveliest and most goofy of the bunch, Hell Squad! (It’s commonly referred to as a 1986 picture, but the copyright date on it is 1984, which makes more sense! Ha ha, it looks like it came from 1974, frankly!)

It begins, of course, with a nuclear explosion, and then we see two scientists in hazmat suits looking over a bunch of empty animal shackles and marveling at the horses, cows and elephants that have been atomized with their special new Super-Neutron bomb! Somewhere in the Middle East, the son of a mustachioed American diplomat complains about the shaky ethics of a bomb that will dissolve livestock and people, but leave buildings standing and papers un-singed!

Well, soon enough the ambassador’s son is kidnapped by the sort of Arabs you used to see on the Carol Burnett show! Ha ha! But the ambassador’s assistant (“And I’m also your friend,” says he) comes up with a plan: take a Las Vegas kickline, spend ten days training them them as commandos, then simply have them rescue the ambassador’s son! Ha ha, it’s a devilishly elegant scheme! The boss of the showgirl army, Jan, accepts the assignment, but warns her girls that to successfully complete the job “it’ll take more than some T&A - it’ll be tough and dangerous!”

After some training, in which the girls scoot through a tunnel, jump a little pond and climb a plywood wall, the movie then settles into a series of scenes in which they alternate between taking group baths and slaughtering random gangs of Arabic peoples, based on anonymous phone calls they receive in their luxurious hotel room! They themselves get kidnapped, but escape and make it back to their room for another bubble bath!

Ha ha, this picture is full of crazy stuff, just enough to qualify it as a Ridiculous Action movie! We see the generic Arabs at leisure, speaking to each other in all-caps subtitles: HERE IS A NEW JOKE: WHAT DID THE ELEPHANT SAY TO THE NAKED MAN? Ha ha! The diplomat loses his mustache halfway through, but this is never acknowledged! The ambassador’s son’s only company in his dungeon is a dead Ponk-boy chained to the wall - a Ponk-boy who also appeared in Hide and Go Shriek! And the Scooby-Doo twist at the end involves a rubberized mask and a lot of retroactive questions vis-à-vis the never-ending stream of bubble baths all the girls took together!

It’s a cheerfully goofy picture, with the girls untroubled by all the human lives they take, and only mildly troubled when they learn that most of the people they killed were perfectly innocent! Ha ha, why worry when there are bubble baths to take! It’s a dumb movie, dumb as a box of dead crabs, and could maybe use a little more pep here and there, but for the most part it’ll entertain you while it’s on! Ha ha, I give Hell Squad two atomized horses!

Burl reviews Raw Force! (1981)

Hello hello hello, it’s Burl, back again with another review! This time I’ve got a picture that’s banana-monster from the word go: that famous and much-loved mulebender Raw Force! I like to think of it as the early-80s exploitation movie that aliens would make if they’d had early-80s exploitation movies described to them, but had never actually seen one themselves, ha ha!

Of course, having had goodies like Without Warning, Deadly Prey and Action U.S.A. described to them the aliens would hasten to hire Cameron Mitchell for their picture! They’d sprinkle in a few other familiar faces, like Jillian Kesner from Starhops and John Dresden from Final Mission and The Dark, and they’d certainly want Vic Diaz, from Beast of the Yellow Night and a thousand other Filipino extravaganzas, to play a cannibalistic monk who grins and claps to express his delight!

And what sort of plot did these extraterrestrial exploiteers cook up for their epic? Well, it seems there’s an island in the Far East where all the disgraced martial arts masters go to die, and a tribe of monks who exchange the big lumps of jade they mine in exchange for ladies of the evening, whom they barbeque to obtain the power to revive the kung-fu masters as zombies! They barter for these lovely comestibles with a gang led by a big greasy guy with a Hitler moustache and an ice cream suit, who kidnap them back in Manila or wherever and fly them in their float plane to Warriors’ Island!

Into this situation comes a little cruise ship whose passenger roster seems comprised largely of martial artists - ha ha, but it’s also a love boat, naturally! This ship is, of course, bound for Warriors’ Island, and once the Hitler simulacrum, Mr. Speer, gets wind of this, he decides he must kill everybody on the ship before his secret is discovered!

Our heroes aboard the kung-fu ship include a couple of dudes from the Burbank Karate Club; a lady police officer; the ship’s cook; and a mustacheman played by a guy whose last acting job for this had been Plan 9 From Outer Space! Ha ha! There’s also Captain Cameron Mitchell, of course, and the brassy lady who owns the ship and serves as cruise director! Some of the greatest scenes in the picture involve random passengers, like for instance one fellow, celebrating his 30^th birthday, who is apparently the result of Jeff Goldblum going through his teleporter and fusing with Richard Benjamin instead of a fly! Ha ha! There’s also Camille Keaton in a bathroom with a fellow trying to unzip her fly, and a most gnarly bartender who atomizes a huge block of ice with his fivehead!

 But much of the movie is made up of kung-fu battles! There are in addition lots of naked ladies, some moments of goofy gore, some disco dancing, a number of explosions, and a scene where the monks very thoroughly baste one young lady in preparation for the barbeque! There’s a happy ending though, and then, as in Buckaroo Banzai, a title card announces a sequel that has yet to materialize! All in all, though it certainly isn’t a good movie, it’s a pretty terrific picture! It’s hard to know what sort of a rating to give this one, which is why I’ve always given ratings against my better judgment; but on reflection I suppose I’ll give Raw Force three axe attacks! Ha ha, thanks, alien moviemakers!

Burl reviews Action U.S.A.! (1988)

Ha ha, sorry about your house! It’s Burl here once again, with an action picture that is just a little too self-aware to qualify as Ridiculous Action (see Deadly Prey for a true example!), so it sits off somewhere within shouting distance of the Andy Sidaris movies, but with only a fraction of that oeuvre’s devotion to the female form!

This one is called Action U.S.A., and I’d never heard of it before the other day, when I scored a hockey bag full of VHS tapes from a pawn shop having a big giveaway! I dropped this one in the bag knowing nothing about it, then read a few reviews of it, all of which promised a rare treat: an octane-fuelled dynamo of a picture exploding with frantic action!

Well, ol’ Burl licked his lips and dived right in! Ha ha, location: Texas! A Good Old Boy named Billy Ray has stolen the mob’s diamonds again, and Don Supremo Cameron Mitchell, famed from his appearances in Gorilla At Large and Without Warning, is not happy about it! Meanwhile Billy Ray heads home to make sweet love to Carmen, his girlfriend! No sooner has the silver-tongued thugpoke watched Carmen take off her shirt and said “Those are lookin’ good,” when two sneering thugs grab him and hang him by his feet out of a helicopter for about two hours, then drop him in a lake! Finally they shoot him, and that’s when Clay and Panama, our Lethal Weapon-like heroes, appear on the scene, and then the chase is on!

Ha ha, Clay and Panama! Clay wears a leather jacket and looks like a normal guy in most shots, but from certain angles he resembles Mac from Mac and Me! Panama, meanwhile, is a nerdier version of Carl Weathers! Both of them exhibit a surprising amount of intelligence and charm for characters in a picture like this!

While the photoplay was not quite the unstoppable rocketsled of mayhem and twisted metal I had been led to expect, it was close enough for horseradishes! The initial thugs are blown up or crashcarted, and two new ones take their place, along with the fearsome Drago, a duster-sporting hitman played by Ross “Armed Response” Hagen! And his response is most certainly armed! There’s plenty of fireballs and flying bullets and bodies of guys proving themselves to one another hurtling through barroom walls and off bridge abutments!

And who is the granite-faced FBI boss? Why it’s Lonnie “Lucky Man” Johnson himself, William Smith, whom we know from pictures as diverse as Fast Company, Eye of the Tiger and Maniac Cop! Ha ha, great casting all around! Aside from the leads and the old ringers, the rest of the cast is made up of stuntmen, the demographic for and by whom this picture was made! Sometimes when stuntmen make a picture you get a Cannonball Run or a Hooper, sometimes you get an Action Jackson, and sometimes you luck into an Action U.S.A.!

It’s a picture well aware of its own excess, and it contains a few welcome dashes of weirdness; but it’s not a goofy wink-and-nod satire, which is very refreshing! Any doubt as to the picture’s bedrock sincerity must be laid to rest by the heartfelt thanks in the end credits to the Brazos Motel, Waco, Texas, where the cast and crew stayed! That must have been quite a party! Ha ha, I give Action U.S.A. two and a half babbling old gas jockeys!

Burl reviews R.O.T.O.R.! (1988)

Bee-dee-bee-dee-bee-dee-bee, it’s Burl, here to review another robot picture! Ha ha, this one is called R.O.T.O.R., and it’s one of those pictures the starting point of which was clearly a couple of fellows saying “Hey, RoboCop and The Terminator – those pictures were popular! Ha ha, let’s combine the two into something completely new!”

Except of course it isn’t completely new! In fact, the results are always pretty shopworn when somebody starts with a brain-matrix like that! With R.O.T.O.R. you’ve got to add a really profound filmmaking incompetence to the mix, and spice it with some bizarre and frequently entertaining narrative decisions!

Over a pixilated robot maquette we learn that crime is simply out of control and that robotic policemen stand the best chance of turning the tide! Then we meet a cowboy scientist named Coldyron – ha ha! – who likes to blow up tree stumps on his ranch before putting in a day’s work at the police robot lab! He’s trying to perfect R.O.T.O.R., a vicious, killer cop-bot being covertly financed by shady military-industrial interests!

The robot isn’t ready and won’t be for some time, which angers Coldyron’s boss, the officious Mr. Buglar! It looks like it’s up to Coldyron’s gormless assistant and the assistant’s assistant Willard, another, friendlier robot, to finish the job! But ha ha, nobody reckons on Shoeboogie! Nobody ever reckons on Shoeboogie! But who is Shoeboogie? Shoeboogie is the janitor, a lascivious Red Indian who dances with Willard, tries much too hard to pick up a lady in a lab coat, then accidentally brings R.O.T.O.R. to life by putting his Walkman headphones down in the wrong spot! Zzzzap! R.O.T.O.R. rises from his plexiglass coffin, jumps on his special velvet-rope-quarantined motorbike and gets down to business!

Ha ha, the funny thing is, R.O.T.O.R. looks pretty much like an ordinary motorcycle cop, albeit one with an especially large and ponky moustache! He shoots some people and puts a punching on others, and then fixes his red-tinted sights on one young lady, whom he chases about hither and yon, grimacing in frustration every time she eludes his grasp! Eventually Coldyron and his pal, the very bizarre lady scientist Steele, whose hairstyle might best be described as a snowhawk, marshall their forces and go after the berserk robot!

Well, this is certainly a bad movie all right, and you might even put it into the Ridiculous Action category along with Deadly Prey and Raw Force! It should have been so much more so, though! It’s very slow going in some parts, with shots being held for a lot longer than they ought to have been (like the scene where we look at the top of an escalator for what seems like a full minute before Coldyron and Steele finally appear over the crest of it!), and a momentum-killing repetitiveness to the scenes of the robot stalking the lady!

It’s too bad it’s not a little zestier, but I guess you can’t have everything! It’s still worth a look for the Ridiculous Action enthusiast, and also for the moustache enthusiasts, who must certainly be out there somewhere! I’m going to give R.O.T.O.R. one and a half chainsaws set to frappé!

Burl reviews Silent Assassins! (1988)

Hi-i-i-i-ya, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a movie that has lots of the martial arts in it, the inaptly named Silent Assassins! Ha ha, have you seen this one? I’m excited to review it, because it feels like a new discovery: a healthy slice of Ridiculous Action that I discovered more or less on my own!

If you recall, Ridiculous Action is the (admittedly unimaginative) name I’ve given to that special microgenre of thrillers that are so gloriously, crazily over the top or just plain puzzling in their attempts to be action-packed that they cause you to guffaw and reach for another handful of chips at regular intervals! And though Silent Assassins doesn’t quite reach the giddy heights of Raw Force or Deadly Prey, it still does pretty well for itself!

It’s ostensibly a ninja picture, like so many Ridiculous Action movies are, and strangely, though I always enjoy Ridiculous Action, I’ve never much cared for the ninja genre! They’re so often repetitive in their action and unimaginative in their execution! But this one dilutes the whole ninja thing by having all sorts of other interesting stuff in it, and the ninjas themselves wear thick balaclavas and big coats rather than the usual tight ninja gear, so it’s got that going for it as well!

The star of the picture is Sam J. Jones, the guy who theoretically could have had a huge career after Flash Gordon if only they hadn’t dubbed over his voice! I’m assuming they’re using his real voice in this one, and there’s nothing particularly wrong with it, so I wonder why they dubbed it for the pulp space adventure! Who knows? Anyway, here Sam plays Sam Kettle, a cop whose methods are unorthodox, but are tolerated by his chief because after all, he’s The Best There Is! The whole movie is set in some pan-Asiatic netherworld, and a bald bad guy named Kendrick, with a heavy but unplaceable accent and a hysterical screechy voice, engineers the kidnapping of a elderly scientist and a little girl!

Why? Well, for The Formula, of course! The scientist is played by the old guy you hire when Wilford Brimley is busy, and Kendrick goes to work on him with bamboo splinters in a pretty horrific scene of torture! But even this harsh treatment isn’t enough to make the brave old duck give up The Formula! In the meantime Sam Kettle has been called onto the case over the objections of his goodly wife Linda Blair! Ha ha! He’s joined by the little girl’s uncle and red-trousered swordsman, and together they take on Kendrick and his legions of heavy-coated, hand-chopping ninjas!

Ha ha, the ridiculousness is strong in this one! Kendrick himself is completely nutso, with his high, shrieky delivery of such lines as “Take that, Dr. Wise Guy!” He pulls the old rubber baby trick on Sam Kettle early in the picture, laughs like a gooney bird whenever he runs, and does a lot of nefarious tortures; but after all that his quick demise in an exploding toy helicopter is a little disappointing! Mako shows up, of course, fresh from Armed Response, and has a few good battles with the ninjas before they pull a bookshelf over on him! Linda Blair showed she could kick buttocks in movies like Savage Streets and Nightforce, but here she’s nothing more than a concerned wife! She gets to shoot a guy at one point, but it’s still pretty disappointing that she’s not more involved in the action! Well, Sam Kettle’s two pals, one of whom reminded me very strongly of Eddie from Big Trouble in Little China, help take up the slack!

It’s got a lively climax, with some head-chopping and hand-chopping, a guy blowing up and Sam firing a rocket launcher at everything in sight without even once loading a shell into it! Given all of this, in the right circumstances, Silent Assassins is about as healthy a slice of second-tier Ridiculous Action as you could want; and having been pleasantly surprised to find this out, I feel kindly disposed to it! I’m going to give it two exploding scientists!

Burl reviews Fists of Blood! (1987)

Hullo, hullo, it’s Burl here to review some Australian action! Ha ha, in the land down under, is it true that roundhouse kicks are delivered counter-clockwise? Fists of Blood is the movie that might have the answer to that question for you!

Just as I did, you’ll probably figure out pretty quickly that this movie, the original title of which is Strike of the Panther, is in fact a sequel, because as with some other sequels, like Silent Night, Deadly Night part 2 for example, long reams of footage from the first installment (Day of the Panther in this case) is used to kick off the story and get untutored viewers such as myself up to speed! In fact we seem to see pretty much all of Day of the Panther compressed into fifteen minutes or so, and it leaves you feeling that you could pretty happily go the rest of your life never bothering with the full-length version!

Ha ha, Fists of Blood ought to come in a fifteen-minute version too, now that I think about it! Like Deadly Prey, it’s an example of Ridiculous Action, although at a few points it clearly knows it! A potato-faced muscleman plays the irresistible Jason Blade, who, his mentor’s incessant voiceover tells us, is all things good, and is trained in the mysterious martial arts! But the nefarious Baxter, Jason Blade’s archest enemy, busts out of the Australian prison he’s in and hatches a scheme involving an army of hockey-masked ninjas, Jason Blade’s girlfriend (whom he loves but can’t commit to, natch), a bundle of dynamite and the old abandoned power plant!

Ha ha, this is a real daffodil, this one is! The potato face (every woman's dream?) is pretty much free of anything so burdensome as a personality, and the action scenes are staged with only minimal excitement! There are a few laffs here and there – note spelling, please! – none of which, or perhaps one of which, are intentional, and there’s also a great deal of aerobic dancing! There’s a pretty good scene where Jason Blade’s mentor, despite his years of training in the mysterious martial arts, is door-hammered by someone in a passing car and has to help Jason out psychically from his hospital bed thereafter!

But it’s mainly just silly, and the silliness is not robust or full-bodied enough to satisfy the way something like Raw Force manages to! And there’s an unfortunate dearth of Cameron Mitchell in this picture too, it ought to be noted! I give Fists of Blood one chicken suit and an extra helping of potatoes! 

Burl reviews Deadly Prey! (1987)

Hi, Burl here with an action film review! Actually, this movie belongs to a subset of the action genre I call Ridiculous Action! There are quite a few other Ridiculous Action movies out there: gems like Gymkata, Raw Force, Fists of Blood, Young Warriors and Ninja III: The Domination, among many others! It’s a pretty dependable subgenre, always good for at least a hearty ha ha and usually for a Cameron Mitchell spotting in the bargain!

This one starts out with a muscleman called Mike, played by a shirtless, blond-locked bodybuilder named Ted Prior who wears the same tattered and increasingly filthy cutoff jean shorts for the whole movie! The picture was directed by David A. Prior, Ted’s brother, who must have been pretty pleased the day he awoke and realized he had a potential action hero in the family! Deadly Prey, as the title hints, is yet another slight variation on that old Most Dangerous Game chestnut of the hunted human turning the tables on his tormentors! It’s similar in many ways to another movie from the same period called Avenging Force, which deserves a look if you’ve never seen it and if you like your action movies to be cheap, cheerful and tremendously violent!

Mike gets kidnapped by a band of mercenaries who have a huge, illicit training camp just south of Los Angeles! You’d think the authorities would notice a mass of men and tanks and M*A*S*H tents and crates of New York Seltzer, or that someone would hear the regular bazooka salvos that erupt from the acres-large staging ground, or that somebody would miss the men whom the mercenaries kidnap to provide themselves with live targets; but nope!

In kidnapping Mike, of all people, the mercenaries have made a fatal blunder! Turns out he himself is a death-dealing supersoldier who was trained by none other than Colonel Hogan, the squarejaw who runs the operation! (That’s quite a little coincidence, I would say, but the movie never cops to it!) Moreover, Mike’s father-in-law is ex-cop Cameron Mitchell, who figures on helping out his daughter by tracking down the missing bodybuilder!

Mike uses his survival skills in the forest, where he is forced to chew worms and eat mice off a spit to nourish himself! Fueled by this provender, he kills a seemingly never-ending parade of mercenary soldiers and would-be mercenary soldiers; is ignominiously captured and savagely beaten; escapes with the help of a sympathetic turncoat mercenary; and finally faces down the most brutal of his adversaries in a fight that involves beating the bad guy to death with his own severed arm! I’d like to say that after all that it ends happily for Mike, his wife and his father-in-law, but I’d be lying!

Mike absorbs an absurd amount of punishment as the movie progresses, but deals out a goodly amount of bum kicking himself! This punching-bag excess is one of the hallmarks of Ridiculous Action, in fact, along with scenes of high hilarity such as the arm-beating and a generally low quality of acting! I have to say that Mike’s wife is played by an actress so deficient of thespian skill that she manages to call attention to her poor performance even in those moments she is meant simply to be sitting silently and looking scared! Now I don’t mean to pick on her, but that’s truly bad acting, ha ha!

But the movie is solid entertainment for all that! It moves along at a pretty good clip once Mike has been turned loose in the wild, and the bad guys suffer some marvelously bloody deaths! Mike’s standard weapon is a fake retractable knife, but he also employs all manner of booby traps and self-made spears and bombs! Sometimes he’ll just club a fellow to death with a giant tree branch! He’s a pretty deadly prey all right!

I give Deadly Prey two sharpened punji sticks, and advise you to watch it along with any other Ridiculous Action pictures you can get your hands on! Look for many more reviews of Ridiculous Action here in the future!