Deadly Impact has Bo Svenson as a detective on the edge who likes to crash cars. He's investigating the murder of a young computer programmer along with his hustler/helicopter pilot buddy, Fred Williamson. They discover the murdered young man had software that allowed him to see when slot machines in Vegas would hit, and some baddies wanted all the money he'd won. Now it's a race against time, as the baddies are looking to kidnap the young man's girlfriend to find out where their money was, and our heroes need to stop them. Will they make it in time? And if they do, how many cars will Svenson crash in the process?
This is a fun one for sure. As Ty and Brett said in their review, this is an Italian production rip-off/cover movie of 48 Hours, and with that in mind we'd rather have Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson than Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. The two of them are a fantastic pair and have great chemistry, which makes them enjoyable to watch. It is a bit on the dark side (John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band?)--I mean, our baddies are leaving a trail of bodies all over Phoenix that would make most mass killers in history blush. That said, when people aren't being murdered, the car chases are fantastic. Just when you think they could be going on too long, one of the cars suddenly flips over somethings and lands on it's roof. How do you not love that? And Svenson's character in particular seems to love crashing into things--the moment he borrows someone's car you know that's it for it. The helicopter chase we get near the end was fun too, culminating in a sweet helicopter explosion. The other thing is, for the juvenile minded of us out there, of which I count myself among them, the word "hacker" hadn't been coined yet, at least not officially, so the term used in this was "computer penetration," and what we know of as "cyber security" was "penetration prevention." I'm giggling about it as I'm writing it. Finally, speaking of Phoenix, we get some nice shots of the city in the 1980s, plus even better, shots of 1980s Vegas, which looks fantastic. If you can find a copy of this, it's worth checking out.
For years we've been talking about getting Fred Williamson into the 30 Club, and when we finally do it, it ends up being a tiny cameo at the end of The Outlaw Johnny Black, so while this is technically his 31st film on the site, I figured we'd use this one to truly celebrate his entry--though even this one is more of a Bo Svenson film, with Williamson playing his sidekick. In less than a month from my writing this, he'll be 86 years old, and he still has in production credits on IMDb. Even without those, I count around 25 films of his that we could do on this site that we haven't yet, so the 40 and 50 Club are definitely possibilities, I just need to review his films at a more consistent clip--which has been the thing that's kept him out of the 30 Club for so long. There's also the element of him being a director, with him being the only member of the 20-10 Club--20+ films as an actor, 10+ films as a director. We do have a couple more of the films he's directed that we can do here as well, I just need to track them down. One thing I liked about this one, was it was an Italian production, but it didn't take place in the future or after the apocalypse. Not that I don't enjoy seeing Williamson in those films too, but this one was a nice change of pace. One of the greatest to ever do it, finally joining the 30 Club here at the DTVC. It's an honor that's long overdue and well-deserved.
As I mentioned above, this also has Bo Svenson. In looking over his bio, I didn't realize how similar to Dolph he is. Both from Sweden, both came here to study--Dolph mechanical engineering, Svenson metaphysics--both fell into acting, and both are 6'5" and athletic. The big difference I think is the size of the big break each got, where Svenson's came in replacing Paul Newman as Robert Redford's co-star in The Great Waldo Pepper, and Dolph's was as Ivan Drago in the hit blockbuster Rocky IV, which led to the lead in another blockbuster, Masters of the Universe. The two did team up in The Killing Machine, which was directed by Dolph, so we at least have that. As far as team-ups go though, it's his work with Williamson that's the best, and this film is another example of that. In Williamson's later films, Svenson would often play a baddie, so it was cool to see the two of them working together and bantering with each other, as Svenson crashed Williamson's car that only had two notes left on it.
We get to use the McDonald's tag for the twelfth time, as this film has not one but two locations, one in Vegas, and then the one above in Phoenix. While I have had McDonald's in Vegas before, I've never been out of the Phoenix airport to have been able to get it there--I did get it near the Grand Canyon though, so I have had it in the state of Arizona. What's great here is the baddies are using the payphone at McDonald's, which I don't know if we've ever seen before. Before the advent of the mass availability cellphones, I remember using payphones at McDonald's, smelling the fries cooking, the scent almost like an anthropomorphized hand pulling me in like you might see with a pie cooling on a windowsill in an old cartoon, I couldn't wait to get my call done so I could get inside and order, despite having had no plan to get anything prior to making that phone call. It was a business model for them that went away when payphones were no longer necessary, but back in 1984 it was in full effect as we watched the two baddies go inside after their call, seemingly unable to resist the siren song of McDonald's. Here in Philly many of the McDonald's near us have closed, so instead of that great French fry smell, it's the Popeye's fried chicken, which can be just as alluring.
Finally, I caught this billboard advertising Arizona State football games on the radio as this car flew past it. It reminded me that in 1984 the Phoenix area didn't have an NFL team yet. I looked it up, the St. Louis Cardinals moved there for the 1988 season--in fact St. Louis has lost two NFL teams in my life, first the Cardinals, and then they got the LA Rams in 1995, where they stayed until they moved back to LA in 2015. It's a strange concept to the rest of the world I think, that in US pro sports--and Canadian when those teams play in the US pro leagues--teams can move around like that. In fact, two of Phoenix's four professional teams are from other cities, as they got their hockey team, the Coyotes, from Winnipeg--don't worry, Winnipeg eventually got Atlanta's NHL team, so they have NHL hockey again. This also shows how much Phoenix has grown in the 40 years since this film was made. They went from having only one top tier professional team, the Phoenix Suns of the NBA, to now one in each of the four sports; and is also now the fifth largest city in the US by population if you just go by city limits, more than doubling their population between the 1980 census where they had just shy of 800,000 people, to the 2020 census, where they had over 1.6 million people. You'd like to think this film helped that trend of growth, but actually there was a 10% dip in population growth between 1970 and 1980, where they had 35% growth, and 1980 and 1990, where they only had 25% growth. My hunch is seeing Svenson driving around like a maniac scared some people off.
And with that, let's wrap this up. I caught this on Plex here in the States, but you can see that that version they have available isn't much better than a VHS rip on YouTube--in fact, you even get the same tracking issues at some points--and Plex is one of the worst for commercials, every 15 minutes you get about 150 seconds-worth, which is a pain, but it's better than nothing, and this is worth checking out however you can.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087461
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