The Killing Zone (1991)

Back in February, I had the guys from Comeuppance Reviews on the podcast to discuss our favorite Evan Lurie and Deron McBee, aka Malibu, movies. Out of the three movies I chose for Malibu, this was the only one I hadn't reviewed, so it's time to fix that. In addition to us and Comeuppance, Bulletproof Action and RobotGEEK's Cult Cinema have covered this as well.

The Killing Zone has Malibu as a guy whose uncle is almost killed by a drug lord, and somehow, Malibu ends up in a prison in Arizona doing hard labor. When the drug lord comes back, a cop who used to work with Malibu's uncle decides the only one who can stop him is Malibu, so he pulls some strings and gets him out of prison. At the same time, the drug lord has a beef with Malibu's uncle, so he keeps attacking the bar his uncle owns. While trying to find the drug lord, Malibu mixes in some reps on the incline bench, and rips the collars off his shirts so they fit over his neck and too sweet pecs. Eventually, the baddie kidnaps the uncle and Malibu's love interest, Melissa Moore, leading to a big confrontation out in the desert somewhere. Will Malibu prevail? Will he prevail in time to get his reps in?

This is pure Malibu, and in that sense it works. If you ever wondered what a Malibu-led actioner would be, this is it, but it feels like this only works in the early 90s. His hair, outfits, sunglasses, and dangling earring only work in the early 90s. But the fact that we had an early 90s, and Malibu worked in that era, makes us all that much luckier that this movie exists as an artifact recording that moment in time. Beyond that, this isn't the greatest. The action is pretty good, but not great for the time it was made; and the story seems to make no sense. We're given Malibu and his uncle as these two great cops/DEA agents or whatever, yet, they keep going back to the uncle's bar, despite the fact that the baddies know they hang out there and keep attacking them there. Wouldn't that be the first place you'd avoid if you were the heroes? In that sense, this is good strictly for the Malibu factor.

But that factor is a strong enough one. In 90s action, we're used seeing Malibu in supporting roles, where his presence rounds out an overall great experience in classics like Skyscraper and T-Force, and while I think that's ultimately where he's at his best, the fact that he can lead a film like this is great too. The problem unfortunately is he didn't get a lot of great action lead scenes. We see him at the prison work yard in the beginning fighting a fellow inmate and taking him down, and we have a sense that that's what this is going to be every fifteen minutes or so, but we kind of lose that, and the film doesn't know how much to give action parts to Malibu, and how much to give them to the uncle; and then the end confrontation scene with the baddie, Malibu doesn't deliver the final shot, which was also a disappointment. So as much fun as it was to get Malibu in the lead, the film didn't do as much with him as they could have.

 

This was distributed by PM Entertainment, but wasn't produced by the PM team of Pepin and Merhi, and also the Tubi version didn't have the PM logo at the beginning. If you look up PM and sort their movies by release date, this is number 16, so very early in the process for them, and this kind of feels like that, like you can almost see the eventual Skyscraper, Sweeper, Recoil, etc. that they would eventually produce for us. I've talked about this before, but looking at the timeline, as the 80s are ending, the Cannon wave is cresting on the back of some bad investments like Masters of the Universe and Superman IV, but then the PM wave is starting, and while the two companies put out different styles of action movies, for us as fans, it led to this fantastic decade or so run from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, and what's great about a movie like this one, is we're seeing that PM wave building from off in the horizon.

Melissa Moore plays Malibu's love interest in this, and while I think she's known as a scream queen, we've seen her here in a good amount of action films, including one of her more famous turns in Samurai Cop, and as the female lead in Jerry Trimble's One Man Army. She doesn't have a lot of work in this though, she has a love scene with Malibu, hangs out at the uncle's bar with him, and then gets kidnapped. She stopped making movies in the early 2000s, and then came back for Samurai Cop 2--except her IMDb shows some porn movies after that. It looks like there's a Adult Cinema actress who is also named Melissa Moore, and the crowdsourced approach to IMDb titles has caused her and the scream queen Melissa Moore to be conflated on a few pictures. This is why William H. Macy isn't Bill Macy, because he didn't want to be confused with Maude's husband Arthur from Maude--and despite this was still confused for him at the 1997 Academy Awards. 

Finally, in the podcast episode I did with the guys from Comeuppance, we combined Malibu with Evan Lurie, in part because they exuded a great meathead quality in the 90s DTV actioners they were in. For some reason, and I can't tell why, the 90s meathead works much better than the 2010s/2020s meathead. Maybe it's the hair, the voice, the language they use, I don't know. Seeing Malibu here with his mullet, dangling earring, and shirts that he ripped the collars off of so they fit over his massive neck and pecs, it works. The modern version of him would be sleeves of tats, busy Affliction T, probably head with shaved back and sides with a hard part, and refers to attractive women as "smoke shows." The idea of putting Malibu or Lurie in that box makes me shudder. I think it's another reason why those 80s/90s actioners work so much better than their modern counterparts, elements like a Lurie or Malibu enhance the film in a way that makes it more fun, not more of an eye-roller.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can stream this for free in the States on Tubi, and I think that's the best way to experience this. It's a solid early PM actioner with Malibu, who's usually a supporting cast member, as the lead. And for the podcast episode I did with Comeuppance on Malibu, it's episode 92 in the archives, "Malibu and Evan Lurie." It's a great conversation, and worth checking out if you haven't yet.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102214

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!