Black Cobra 3 has the Hammer back as Malone, only this time instead of his chief trying to unload him onto the Philippines, now the son of former buddy from Vietnam comes back to ask for his help, after said buddy is killed. So the Hammer cashes in some accrued paid time off and heads over there. There is a mystery to be solved first, which he, the son, and another CIA agent who's well-versed in computers tries to solve; and once solved, they head into the jungle for a mini jungle slog, before Williamson and crew are able to take everyone down. Also, Mike Monty is in this as the captain, because it's a movie made in the Philippines.
This is another fun one. I take some points off for the jungle slog, but even with that you get the sense that the filmmakers are like "let's keep this to a minimum, no one is coming to a Williamson flick to see him chop vines with a machete and drink water from a canteen near a waterfall." The film starts with a fantastic grocery store scene, a la Cobra, only, again, in Williamson's "cover version" style as opposed to anyone ripping it off, which makes it fantastic. It's not easy to maintain that level of action throughout, but the film does manage to shoehorn in a shoot-out every 10 minutes or so, which is all we can ask for. I don't know if I like this as much as the first two, but put together, these three make for a really fun movie night marathon.
Williamson brings it again in this one. He doesn't have the material he had in the first two, especially in the form of the one-liners, but what makes Williamson so great is he can carry a film without that. We have a lot of Williamson queued up to go after this, I just need to make it happen. Like this movie, which is available on Tubi, he has a lot of stuff available to stream for free or as a part of subscription packages, which makes it real easy for anyone to get acquainted with him if you haven't already, or if you're someone who wants to introduce Williamson to your friends so they can appreciate all of his goodness. It's a very good thing.
The guy who plays the friend's son is Forry Smith, and while I thought he looked familiar, I couldn't figure out exactly what from, so I looked him up on IMDb. Turns out he has had a spot on almost every TV show in the 80s and 90s. We're talking Matlock, Jake and the Fatman, Growing Pains, My Two Dads, Nurses, you name it, he guested on it--he even did a Renegade episode. For anyone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, going through his IMDb bio is like a walk through time, memories of nights watching network TV because cable wasn't as established back then. It was a jolt of nostalgia I wasn't expecting when I wrote this post, but a welcomed one, and the kind of fun I enjoy from doing reviews like this, the idea that you never know what you're going to uncover in the process.
When we talk about Philippine action films, the Jungle Slog often comes up as an issue. It's this forbidden fruit or siren song for the filmmaker, particularly Italian filmmakers trying to produce something on the cheap: just throw your characters in the jungle for 45 minutes, mix in the occasional shoot-out, rinse, repeat. The funny thing is, even now, 30 years later, filmmakers who set films in the Philippines can't get away from it. Look at Showdown in Manila or Death Fighter. The thing is, it so seldom works--in fact, off the top of my head I can't think of an instance where it has worked. What we have here in this film, is a situation where the jungle slog is limited, and then the presence of Williamson mitigates the slog factor itself, so the film is able to overcome it. I mean, is that the best we can do, have a film device that in the best scenario is overcome by other factors? If so, it's a film device that needs to go. I implore you filmmakers in the Philippines, stay out of the jungle!
In the last post I talked about tagging Mike Monty, so I finally did. It looks like this is his 7th film on the site, which seems low, but maybe that's right. In the process, I saw on my older posts that Photobucket was up to their old games with the watermarks again. One of the worst decisions I made in making this site was trusting those scam artists with hosting my photos there. We talk about bait and switches all the time, but they had the ultimate one, selling themselves as a free site, until I was almost a 1000 blog posts in with all of my images uploaded there, and then they pulled the rug out from under me. The problem is, even if I were to replace them all with images sourced on Blogger like I do now, the images linked people to the image pages I used to make, which had more content, so working out that HTML fiasco is going to be another issue--plus, having to go through almost 1000 posts anyway to replace the images themselves is such a chore. Here's to you Photobucket, you're one of the worst, and I rue the day I ever trusted you in the first place.
Since I'm getting into a negative space when I'm talking about a positive movie, I might as well wrap this up. You can stream this free on Tubi right now, which I think is the way to go. Do like I did, and watch all three in quick succession. This is the Hammer you came for, and the Hammer you need.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204901
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