Shotgun follows Ian (Stuart Chapin), a detective who, with his partner Max (Rif Hutton), work the vice beat in LA. After reports come in of a "basher" working over ladies of the night, Ian discovers his sister, who happens to also be a lady of the night, falls in with this guy, and meets an untimely end. If Ian was on the edge before, now he's over the edge, which leads to him losing his badge and gun, forcing him to work as a bounty hunter. He's so good at his job, he earns the nickname "Shotgun," but he hasn't given up on the case, and in true PM style, this is building to a huge blowout.
This is some really fun early PM, but it's also really early PM. I mean look at that font above telling us it's a Pepin and Merhi production? Even AIP could afford better looking credits than that. We also don't have any names in this, beyond Paulo Tocha as a hotel desk clerk, and then Rif Hutton, who you may remember from his KFC commercials where he was the manager of the Lake Edna restaurant (more on that later). Just the same, we get glimpses of the action that will end up being PM's hallmark, and the hero, played by Stuart Chapin, is hilarious, both when he means to be and when he doesn't. In one fantastic scene, he fills a guy's buttocks with buckshot, then tells the guy "if I wanted conversation, I would've shot Dick Cavett!" Indeed, though I doubt Dick Cavett would've taken that shit lying down. We also get a fantastic theme song for Shotgun, that's more beautiful than words can say. Because this is very low-budget and doesn't have as many names, it's probably a movie night choice for your more discerning bad action movie friends--connoisseurs, if you will.
And if you won't, I understand--whatever that means. This is the second-earliest PM flick we've looked at here, after LA Heat, which means this is so early that a few City Lights movies still came out after. This one was written and directed by Addison Randall, who, with Charles T. Kanganis, made up the core of the early PM creative team in addition to Pepin and Merhi, and as such this really feels like a Randall or Kanganis film. The things that would become hallmarks of PM, cops on the edge, topical stories, and shootouts and explosions, are here, they're just waiting for the magic of names like Spiro Razatos or Don "The Dragon" Wilson to show up and take them over the top (Stallone style), or a name like Wings Hauser to drag them under the top(?) in a way only he can. They were just starting out here, and it shows, but knowing what they're going to become, it's fun to go back to the past like this and join them on that ride.
I wanted to talk about the film's lead, Stuart Chapin, who unfortunately left us in 2016. Also unfortunately he didn't get much more work than this film. On the one hand, I can understand why as far as PM were concerned, when soon after they were getting names like Wings Hauser and Don "The Dragon" Wilson for their films, a relative unknown like Chapin would've been left out in the cold; but on the other, why not make a name out of Chapin? Yes, he looked more like a guy who'd sell grilled cheese out of the back of his Jeep Comanche while touring with the Dead, but don't let that "who wants to play some hacky sack?" exterior fool you, Chapin is plenty willing to deck a smug asshole IA guy or fill a bail jumper's buttocks full of buckshot before he brings him in. He should've at least gotten one more film, maybe a sequel to this, Revenge of Shotgun?--complete with a new "Shotgun" theme song, right?
Before the final showdown, this film takes a page from The A-Team by having our hero and his old Army buddy do some welding to turn a large Jeep into a death machine of sorts so they can confront the baddies down in Mexico. What makes this better than your average A-Team welding montage though, is it's set to the "Shotgun" theme song, which is a fantastic song; and we see our hero and his buddy, as they work harder, need to shed layers and get sweaty. The friend even has a Freddie Mercury look to him, very "extra in a gay leather bar scene in an 80s comedy," the kind of thing that was funnier back then than it is now, like "oh look at buttoned-down Eugene Levy getting hit on by that guy with a mustache, sunglasses, and a leather baseball cap. Levy's uncomfortable around gay people, hilarious!" I don't know what they were going for with that montage, but whatever it was, I loved it. We just needed that Shotgun's Revenge sequel with more sweaty montages of men welding set to the hero's theme song. Such a missed opportunity for PM. "Shotgun... sweaty sweaty welding..."
Finally, who remembers the Lake Edna KFC ad campaign? Rif Hutton from this movie, wearing a dress T-shirt and tie, with his kooky family watching football and eating buckets of the Original Recipe, or his kooky customers chowing down on honey BBQ wings, served by his kooky staff. He was only a couple years removed from this film when he did that, but unfortunately it was maybe ten years too early, because back then ad campaigns were more disposable. How many years have insurance companies kept the same people? Or you have situations where companies bring back someone from a previous campaign, like the "can you hear me now?" guy, as if he's some kind of fixture in the zeitgeist--and maybe he is. Had Hutton done these Lake Edna commercials in 2002 instead of 1992, sometime in 2010 KFC would've done a big Super Bowl ad to bring him back, and no one would've really given a shit outside of hacky morning talk shows the next day doing segments on the Super Bowl ads--and confusing Samuel L. Jackson and Lawrence Fishburne in the process. (As an aside, is it only Americans who celebrate ads like that? We're essentially celebrating people lying to us and tricking us into buying a lot of shit we don't need. Why do we do that?) The world of fried chicken has come a long way in the last 30 years, and I don't remember the last time I had KFC. It has this combination nostalgia feeling and feeling of pain in my stomach, like I want to eat some and I don't. (As a second aside, in college, I remember a chubby white kid with dreads told my buddy and me that KFC changed their name from Kentucky Fried Chicken because they stopped using real chicken. He was undeterred when I told him it was because they thought the word "fried" sounded unhealthy, or that factory farming chickens is much cheaper than growing fake chicken meat in a lab. My friend and I ended up tracing the origins of his urban legend to a Time article about a research lab generating cell tissue. It felt like a great own at the time, but really, the own was the guy being a chubby white kid with dreads.)
And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently this is free to stream on Plex and the Roku Channel. I prefer the latter because their commercials aren't as intrusive. This is classic early PM for the bad action movie connoisseur, you can't go wrong with it.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145464
Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/
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