The Hostage (1998)

Who knows when this first came on my radar. Probably as a Cynthia Rothrock flick. But then I see that it also has Ted Prior--yeah, that Ted Prior, Danton from Deadly Prey--and I'm all in. Now, I can't find confirmation of this, but The Hostage is also supposed to be an AIP flick. Ted Prior is the only connection I can find between this film and the famed production/distribution company though.

The Hostage is about a gang of high-end thieves who plan to break into a really rich businessman's house, hack into his computer, and download all his money. Ted Prior plays a down-on-his-luck former special forces dude who signs on with this crew so he can make some cash that he and his daughter can live off of. Things go wrong, though, and the guys are holed up in the mansion, holding the rich dude hostage, while the feds have them under siege outside, led by agent Cynthia Rothrock. Will the thieves get away with the cash?

I don't know if you can tell from the pictures, but this is pretty hard core, as in the film stock they shot on was the same video quality of most porn films. How in the hell did Rothrock get roped into this one? What, was she in her hotel room near where they were planning to make the film, when a producer visits and says "Hey, we got some bad news. The film reels and cameras didn't make it out from LA. Yeah, it looks like we'll be shooting on video. I know I know, we're not happy about it either, but, what can we do. The other guys said you'd be pissed, but I said no way, Cynthia's a true professional..." I don't really know after that whether this was a good or bad movie, because, shot as it was, I couldn't take it seriously. Yes, script-wise it was pretty un-proofread, and after Rothrock, the acting wasn't the greatest; but it was fun for what it was, real bottom of the barrel stuff.

I have to imagine, for someone like Rothrock, she loves that people like me are big fans, but there are some drawbacks, like when I have a movie blog that spotlights her films, and I find something like this. She was great in it though, she just didn't have a big part, and never did any martial arts. I'd have loved to see her and Ted Prior go at it. She spends the entire film leading the police siege of the mansion, though she does pick up a gun and shoot some guys near the end. One great scene I liked came after she walks away from some of the local cops, and one of them remarks that she's a total bitch, and this other guy says "hey morons, you're only saying that because she's a woman. If it was a guy, you'd be like 'Yes sir' and all excited to get after it." The people who made Death Race 2 could learn a lot about their own misogyny from The Hostage.

Ted Prior's back. I know, you probably never thought we'd see him again. He's aged a bit, and now looks like a cross between David Bradley and Rick Hill, which is a good combination to have. He has a little more action than Rothrock, but this is nowhere near the level of awesomeness that Deadly Prey was, it's more just the novelty that the guy from that was in this.

This beefy guy below was one of the highlights of the film for me. He was the leader of the gang, and he had this great voice and very doughy demeanor that was all pretty funny. It's guys like this that make a movie like this worth watching--almost.

Dana Plato had a small role as Prior's sister in-law. She died a year after this came out. In her early scenes, I couldn't really tell it was her, because the film was poorly lit, but at then end, when she comes back, I could see her better, and you could tell that she wasn't well. She had three more films released after The Hostage, including a soft core porn film called Different Strokes.

I don't know how you'd find this outside maybe the torrent route, and I don't know if you want to find it unless you're a Rothrock completist, or the idea of her and Prior in a film intrigues you. As a note: they never share any screen time together.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256082/

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/

 

The Expert (1995)

A while back, our friend Kenner over at Movies in the Attic sent us this, along with a bunch of others. He's learning the hard way that it often takes me a little while to get to all my submissions, especially if it's something without any Hall of Famers to make it a priority. He's reviewed this one as well, a part of his Jeff Speakman Binge post, and you can click on that link to see what he thought.

The Expert has Jeff Speakman as a former special forces dude working as a consultant to the police department whose sister is murdered by a serial killer. The guy goes to jail, and then some such silliness occurs and it's not exactly certain whether or not he'll get the chair, or the classic cinematic ploy, the insanity defense, will rear it's ugly head and the guy will get away with murder (we'll get into this cinematic device later). After much foot dragging, in the final fifteen minutes Speakman decides to get his military gear together and go to the prison to exact his own justice, and not a moment too soon, because his sister's killer is planning a prison break.



This was bad on two levels. First, because we're the DTVC, and we're looking at a Jeff Speakman flick, let's look at the action-- or lack thereof. And the thing is, the film promises some. Right at the beginning, we see, either Speakman or a stuntdouble, doing a forward facing repel. As an occasional ice climber and rock climber, I know how crazy that is. He looks like he's taking out some SWAT team guys, but we find out he's just training them. End scene, and end action for 45 minutes. Then we get another great scene, then we're done for another 20 minutes, then a small scene, and then the end, which really wasn't that good either. So bad on the action. But second, it was bad on the Lifetime movie front as well. It pretty much spends its nickel right away when it kills the sister off, but then takes forever to use what it spent. Either don't kill the sister off, have Speakman save her in the nick of time, and make the film a cat and mouse game as the killer gets out of jail and tries to kill her to get his revenge; or, kill the sister off as planned, but get right into Speakman's revenge. Why wait the entire film? All of this stuff that comprised the bulk of the film could be done in five minutes of dialog, then you can have Speakman get his stuff and kick some ass. Instead, nothing happens in the interim, and that's kind of the point of a movie, things need to happen.

And what this means, unfortunately, is that Speakman is wasted. He has a few really nice scenes, but by the end, it just wasn't working. Also, a lot of the fights had him wearing big coats, which made them harder to watch. Had this been a better Lifetime movie, the lack of fight scenes would've worked. I can think of two films off the top of my head that utilized the "psycho is trying to kill the girl hero must protect her" paradigm really well: Blackjack and Blackbelt. Then you could have Speakman constantly working. Maybe the better play would've been to get rid of the sister all together, and have the psycho target Elizabeth Gracen's character.



That's right, I mentioned the beautiful Elizabeth Gracen, who actually celebrated her birthday recently, on April 3rd. I had no idea that she and I had birthdays so close. She plays a reporter in this, but her character is pretty much wasted by the complete lack of plot. She's like his love interest, but not, or kind of, and she gets a few more scenes as a reporter talking to James Brolin at his jail and stuff. In the paragraph above I mentioned her maybe playing the psycho's target, and Speakman protecting her, but based on how great she was in Highlander: The Series, a simple damsel in distress role probably wouldn't have suited her. Still, it would've been better than what we ended up with.

Yes, I said James Brolin. He plays the warden at the prison. He's also on the cover. Other great cameos include Ted Raimi, and the late Jim Varney. How do you not love Jim Varney in anything, right? His one great scene was one of the few shining moments of the film. Brolin was great too, he was just wasted, like everyone else, by the motionless plot. His tough-as-nails warden could've been great if they went with a Death Warrant theme with Speakman infiltrating the prison for an extended period to get his sister's killer, but with the way they went, it barely meant anything. Raimi has one scene, where he's trying to fix a copier, and the killer comes by and offers to help, which causes Raimi to leave, ending his contribution to the film.



Above I mentioned the classic "insanity defense as a cinematic device". You know what I'm talking about, the portrayal in the movies of this binary system in our courts, where it's either someone is guilty of murder, and he or she goes to jail, or someone is guilty by reason of insanity, which means he or she spends six months in a mental hospital, deemed cured, and is then allowed back into society none the worse for wear. Who in the hell came up with that? The problem is, people believe these myths because they have no other basis of information to refute such asinine concepts, then they hear the insanity defense in real life, and immediately think someone is getting away with something.

All right, before I hop on my soapbox, it's time to wrap this up. You can get this through Amazon-- and clicking on the Amazon link through imdb gets you some great "how to" sex movie results mixed in-- but I'm not sure you'd want to. It's just a big ol' pile o' blah.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109760/

Armstrong (1998)

I've been meaning to get to this one for some time now. First it was on Netflix Watch Instantly, then it wasn't, then I went on hiatus at the end of the summer, then I came back, it came back, but other movies kept bumping it down the pecking order. Now we're finally here. Also, this has been done by two other blogs that are well known to readers of the DTVC, Ty at Comeuppance Reviews, and Sutekh at Explosive Action.

Armstrong has Frank Zagarino as an ex-CIA dude in Russia training their new version of the KGB that's supposed to be more US friendly. At the same time, a very moist Charles Napier has been sent by the President to look into some nukes being sold by rogue members of the Russian military to terrorist organizations. He's killed by Joe Lara, but not before Zagarino gets the proof he needs on a video tape. The problem is, how far up the military chain does this go in Russia? As far as Richard Lynch?



I kind of dug this one. It was a little long, but the whole thing was so gratuitous that I kind of let that pass. I mean, the plot was pretty well worn but funny, the action scenes were hilarious but in a fun way, plus, this was directed by Menahem Golan, and we know he knows how to do bad action. In fact, this felt like something that was made in the early 90s, not 1998-- only the style of the Pepsi logo in one scene gave the shooting date away-- so you could see how it might have fit Golan's other "Cannon", get it? This is the kind of movie you're dealing with here: Kimberley Kates has a full-frontal scene when she comes out of the shower, which transitions into her putting on wet clothes, no underwear, Lara pointing a gun between her legs and looking up her skirt, then her running around in a see-through wet blouse during a foot chase. The foot chase goes on way longer than the action warranted, and really kills the film's momentum, but there was a sense that Golan and whoever else that was involved in making the film were like "hey, we convinced Kimberley to do the wet T-shirt scene, let's get our money's worth." If you dig that kind of thing, you'll dig this.

Frank Zagarino is back again. This will be his fourth film, but only his third starring role. We didn't do this one though solely for him, though having him helped. The Napier and the Lynch didn't hurt things either, plus, having Lara as the heel really worked. I mean, replace Lara's double-breasted suit with a Star Trek: The Next Generation T, and he'd be one of those guys they showed in Trekkies selling replica Klingon weapons at the convention. It would've been nice if he and Zagarino had a better end fight, but it was still good.



Richard Lynch was in this as a Russian colonel, so he affected a Russian accent. It was funny, because his native Brooklyn accent is still pretty apparent. Try to mix those two together. He was also kind of a secondary baddie to Joe Lara, which didn't feel right-- Lynch should always be the big baddie. This is only his sixth film on the DTVC, and I know we had talking in the past about making a concerted effort to get more of his films up here, because he is such a great DTV baddie. He's always on my radar for that reason, it's just a matter of making it happen.

This had to be the most moist film we've ever reviewed on here. Everyone was just covered in Patrick Ewing style perspiration. First it was Napier, but then the rest of them followed suit. I'm talking like "I've been hiking in 90-degree weather" dripping wet kind of moistness; or "I'm way overweight and the AC doesn't work at the Chinese food buffet" kind of moistness. Whose idea was that? It wasn't appealing, it was gross.



As I mentioned above, Kimberley Kates has a full-frontal nude scene-- we're talking top and bottom. Then she runs around for a good ten minutes of screen time in a wet see-through blouse. There's even a very tasteful part where she sits down in front of a room service cart to eat, and Lara pops out from underneath it and points his gun between her legs, making sure he gets a good look too-- she's wearing no underwear. She also gets punched in the face a few times, tied to a chair, and when all is said and done, she's rescued by Zagarino and his Russian friend, and the three walk off into the sunset together, none the worse for wear. One of the funnier things she did was make this pirate "Arrgh!" when she's first getting tied up.

This is pure bad Menahem Golan, reminiscent of the Cannon days, but not quite as good. I saw it as a solid bad movie night film. It's not just so bad it's good, but it's gratuitously bad it's good, and sometimes that gratuitousness (gratuity?) can be too much for some people, i.e. the film takes on too much of that lowest common denominator principle. I can see that, and Armstrong definitely pushed it, but in the end it worked for me.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139029/

April Fools (2007)

In a tradition I started two years ago, on my 30th birthday, with the film April Fools Day, I have been doing a film celebrating April 1st. It looks now, though, like this might be the last time, because I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel-- even if this has Obba Babatundé.

April Fools is about a group of really old high school kids in Chicago who kill a popular TV advertisement actor in the process of an April Fools joke gone bad. One year later, someone is bumping off the kids involved with the prank. Could this be some kind of revenge?



No style, no substance. It's okay to have one without the other, but neither doesn't work. One thing I'd consider mixing in is a collapsible knife-- it makes those stabbing scenes that much better. Also, if the stunts look clunky, don't use them. Maybe try humor instead. A great example came when the killer accosted a victim in the bathroom. The kid turns before the killer can get him, and a clunky-as-all-hell struggle ensues. Why not do something funny there instead? A bathroom scene is screaming out for dark humor. The end was the worst, because we get this idea that the killer had spiked the main girl's drink, meaning she'd be knocked out, wake up somewhere, and he'd reveal his motives. Instead, he's like "drink up your cola", and she has a sip, then some more clunkiness ensues, and she escapes, leading to an even more poorly choreographed struggle that ends in the killer's death. I mean, with a running time of 75 minutes, there was plenty of time to flesh some things out, replace those awkward-- and extremely silly in a bad way-- looking struggles, and have more fun with it. In the end, this is a glorified YouTube video with Obba Babatundé.

Obba Babatundé. Can we say it again? Obba Babatundé. Just rolls off the tongue right? The other film of his we've done is Black Dynamite, which was fantastic. He has a pretty impressive resume, so who knows how he ended up in this. Obba Babatundé. Obba Baba Obba Baba Obba Babatundé. He plays the police chief and father to the main girl, which is what it is I guess. He really just goes around investigating but not actually finding anything, because the girl solves the case herself and defeats the killer herself. Obba Babatundé.



Recognize this guy? He's everywhere now, huh? You can't go a commercial break without seeing him at least once. Who'd a thunk, out of everyone here, the guy who was in the film for only the first five minutes would be the most recognizable, even more so than Obba Babatundé and rapper Lil Flip. Good for you That Guy, and good luck in your future ad gigs.

I'm not too familiar with rapper Lil Flip, but I gotta figure this movie was a bad move for him. First, he's playing in some high school gym. What, you can't book a club in the city? Second, he hits on the main girl, who is in high school, instead of getting out of there with the quickness and getting into some trouble in Chi-Town. And finally, he gets shot down by the main girl. Wow, not a good look. Come on Lil Flip, you need a better agent. It's bad enough to be in a glorified YouTube video of a movie, but one that makes you looks so bad? Why couldn't you have played someone else? Like an area rapper on the come up? Then playing at a high school doesn't look so bad, and neither does getting rejected by the main girl.



Speaking of the main girl, she was played by Aaliyah Franks, and she didn't do a bad job, which makes it that much more disappointing that the film went in bad directions for her. Why the clunky fight scene with the killer at the end? Why the awkward "you're never around anymore dad" with Obba Babatundé? What they should've done was had her as a very stuck up daddy's girl, and Obba Babatundé feels like he did a bad job by spoiling her, so he gets all her friends to join up and play this big April Fools joke to show her some humility. It would've given her some depth to work with: moving from stuck-up and snobby to humble and down-to-Earth; and it would've given the bad looking killing scenes a better explanation.

Of the 75 minute running time, a good 5-10 minutes are taken up with shots of the Windy City, especially at the beginning. The problem is, Chicago never plays a part in the film. This could've taken place in Omaha or Birmingham or Milwaukee. Chicago is one of those cities that can be a character. Just look at Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Or on the other hand don't use any shots of famous Chicago landmarks in the beginning, and have the film take place in Any City, USA, which works well too. This situation, though, was like a city bait-and-switch, or a lazy addition of meaningless footage.

This is available on Watch Instantly. With a 75 minute running time-- of which I'd say 15 is taken up by opening shots of Chicago and end credits-- it could make for a good bad movie night thing, especially if you and your buddies are up for something on an MST3K level to heckle. On the other hand, this had a chance to be something more than that, and it just feels like the effort wasn't put into it, which is too bad.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1083844/

Dollman (1991)

This movie has the triple threat of Charles Band, Tim Thomerson, and DTVC Hall of Famer Albert Pyun. Throw in its availability on Watch Instantly, and it was a must. I mean, how do you not love the idea of Tim Thomerson as a cop from another planet who chases a criminal to Earth, where he only stands 13 inches tall?

Dollman is pretty much what I just said above. Thomerson plays Brick Bardo (classic Pyun name), a renegade, violent cop from a planet 10,000 light years away, who chases after the living severed head of one of his oldest enemies, into a ban of energy that transports them in their space ships to Earth, the South Bronx to be exact, where they're only 13 inches tall. Bardo finds he can help a local woman in her fight against crack dealing gangs that have taken over her neighborhood, but she isn't sure she wants his help because he's so violent-- even at 13 inches!



This is a lot of fun. Sure, it has a couple too silly for words moments, like when Bardo jumps out of an upper story window to the street below, where he grabs onto a moving car and rides it to where the baddies' hideout is; but for the most part it's just a fun low-budget sci-fi actioner, with a lot of familiar faces and some pretty gory shoot-outs. The film starts with a hostage situation in a laundry mat on Bardo's home planet, and he shows up, everyone there expecting he wants to help. Nicholas Guest, the cop on the scene, asks him what he plans to do. "I'm going to wash my whites in hot water, and my colors in cold water with a warm rinse." "What?" "This is where I do my laundry, and that's what I plan to do." It starts out this awesome, and pretty much keeps it going from there. Throw in appearances from other Pyun mainstays Vincent Klyn and Michael Halsey, and a baddie played by former child actor and current it actor Jackie Earle Haley, and you have a formula for a good time.

We've been on a pretty good string of Albert Pyun films lately, so hopefully we'll keep that up. It's hard to go wrong with a movie about a violent cop played by Tim Thomerson that's only 13 inches tall and likes to blow people apart with his custom made firearm, and with a running time of 75 minutes without the credits, that's usually an even surer bet. Beyond the camp, there were also some really cool sets and shots, especially of Tim Thomerson with a fallen building behind him that looks like an old mushroom box or something. Obviously, this movie is more about fun than anything, but it's always good to see some shots that are more on the artistic side, because it tells us, the viewer, that at least the process is being taken seriously, even if the content isn't meant to be.



This role by Jackie Earle Haley came a few years before his 13-year hiatus, which saw him come back in 2006 with an Oscar nomination. Not a bad deal if you ask me. I actually really liked him on the few episodes I've seen of Human Target. Here he plays a gang lord who comes across the severed-head bad guy Thomerson was chasing, and while he's trying to carve out supremacy in the South Bronx, he's also after Thomerson because the severed told him he could become a problem. It was a good role. I don't know that we could get him in another Pyun film now though.

"Back off Warchild, seriously." It's time to take inventory of this film's Pyun mainstays, starting with Thomerson. There was also Nicholas Guest, Michael Halsey, and DTVC favorite Vincent Klyn, listed here as "Vince Klyn". None of them get more than a scene or two outside of Thomerson, but it's always good to see them.



According to imdb, Dollman was filmed both in LA and in the South Bronx, so I'm not sure how much of the South Bronx stuff was filmed on location or back out in LA. I've actually been to the Bronx before-- maybe not the South Bronx, I'm actually not sure where exactly I was, because we were lost. I was with a couple classmates in college going from UMaine to DC for an anthropology conference, and the girl driving had these weird directions that involved getting off of one Interstate in the Bronx, then getting onto another. It was a trip, and when I saw the highway we wanted, the girl was like "we can't go that way, it's a one-way street", and I was like "Jesus, just go, let's get the hell out of here." It's always funny to get rural Maine mixed with the city, because rural Maine never has any idea how to cope with it. I would like to go there again under better circumstances though. The parts we were in didn't look that bad.

You've probably learned more than you wanted to about my brief experience in the Bronx, so I'll wrap this up. Simply put, 75 minutes, Albert Pyun, Tim Thomerson as a 13-inch violent Dirty Harry style cop, and a good amount of gore and fun. What more could you want?

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101751/

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)

A couple weeks ago, or friend Mr. Gable at Mr. Gable's Reality threw down the gauntlet, seeing if anyone else wanted to tackle The Garbage Pail Kids Movie with him, and he had two other takers. You can read what all three thought on his site. Unfortunately, I had some other films on tap, so my look at this one had to wait. I remembered first seeing it when it came out on VHS, and not being very impressed. My buddy bought it on eBay about 8 years ago, but I never got the chance to see it with him. Now, with it on Watch Instantly, I had my chance.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is either about some short, gross humanoid aliens, or some homunculi created through the magic of Anthony Newley-- the movie is never exactly clear. What they are clear on is that Newley runs a magical antique shop, where he keeps these kids in a garbage pail in the form of living green slime, and they're released when the kid working for Newley runs afoul of some bully and his crew, which is more like Whitey Bulger and his gang than it is a childhood bully. Anyway, now Newley wants to get them back in the pail, while the small people want to see the world, and they help the kid get the girl-- who is a bit older than him, to the point the cops might need to be involved.



Before I discuss why I didn't like this when I was younger, I should get into why I don't exactly like it now. It's just kind of weird. I don't mean about the Garbage Pail Kids-- I get the charm in them, because I loved the cards/stickers growing up. It was the other stuff. Like how the gator one (Ali Gator) looked and sounded hilarious, but he liked to bite people's toes off-- which is just weird. Even weirder, is the scene where the kid is taking a bath, and his foot is sticking out of the bathtub, and Ali Gator looks like he's about to do something quasi-sexual with it. What were they thinking? Or when the guy who was a more menacing version of the neighborhood bully, takes the kid underground to the sewage system, ties him to a pipe, then unleashes some raw sewage from another pipe, something the kid would've died from if the Garbage Pail Kids hadn't saved him. That's pretty rough and twisted for a bully. There was a fun message in here about how beauty is only skin deep, plus some great gross-out humor-- and the Garbage Pail Kids themselves were pretty funny, with mechanical puppet heads on midget bodies-- but the bad weirdness diminished the good for me.

Now, as an 8 or 9-year-old watching this, my complaints were much simpler: where the hell was Adam Bomb? He was the face of the Garbage Pail Kids, and you left him out? They must've really been going for a cash-grab here, because a Garbage Pail Kids movie without Adam Bomb is like a Spiderman movie without him climbing up a building, or a Superman movie without him flying. I get that a midget with an exploding head might have been something difficult to pull off, but you just can't make a Garbage Pail Kids movie without it.



"Tom Servo, if you don't stop doing your Anthony Newley I'm going to throw you through the wall." I want to say that came in the Starforce: Fugitive Alien II episode, when the gang did a montage of songs based on "He Tried to Kill Me with a Forklift". One interesting fact about Newley and this movie: the kid who worked for him was named Dodger, and Newley is probably best known for his role as The Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist. And then he did this...

Windy Winston farts in a biker's face, and the strength of the flatulence is such that it blows the guy's moustache off. See, that's frickin' hilarious. The thing is, five minutes before, Ali Gator bit a biker's toe off. Weird. Why not have the bikers be freaked out that Ali Gator looks like a freakin' half gator half midget mutant, and they attack him for that? Then they could drive their point home that you can't judge a book by its cover-- which, when you consider that the Ali Gator character bit people's toes off, I'd say in that case you'd be perfectly justified in judging a book by its cover, right?



That's Katie Barberi, who played the part of Tangerine, the girl the kid was after. I'm not saying she's bad looking there, but have you seen her now? Wow, total knockout. It's a fascinating thing with women from the 80s, because the fashions from then were so different from today's, especially with the hair and make-up, that so many look even better in their forties than they did then. She's made a big career for herself doing telenovelas, which I imagine is nice work if you can get it, right?

The fact that this is available on Watch Instantly right now makes it a better deal than usual. I don't know, because while you have great elements like Anthony Newley and a Garbage Pail Kid farting a biker's moustache off, you also have a kid tied to a pipe with raw sewage dumped on him, and that same kid in a quasi-foot fetishism scene that was fully off-putting. I guess maybe you gotta put up with some bad weird to get some good weird, huh?

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093072/

Strike Commando (1987)

This was another one of the films our buddy from down under, Sutekh, sent us in a package that also contained Deadly Prey and Robowar. Like Robowar, Strike Commando is a Japanese VHS rip, which comes complete with Japanese subtitles. If you want you can check out his review of both this and the sequel, at his site, Explosive Action.

Strike Commando stars DTVC favorite Reb Brown as Sgt. Michael Ransom, the best guy we got, doing special forces work in Vietnam. He ends up stranded, thought to be dead, after a mission goes wrong-- because evil colonel Christopher Connelly screwed it up. Now Reb is back at the US base, and he has proof that the Russians are involved. Connelly wants more proof, so he sends Brown back in, only for him to get captured and tortured by the evil Russian officer Jakoda. Problem is, all they've done is awoken a sleeping bear, because Reb Brown is pissed, he's armed, and he's beefy, and everyone's gonna pay!



This is fantastic in every way imaginable. Is this good Reb Brown? No, it's great Reb Brown. Is this great Bruno Mattei? No, it's exceptional Bruno Mattei. Is this a good Vietnam War in the Philippines movie? No, it's pretty much as good as it gets. This is just the perfect get your buddies together and laugh at the screen kind of film. I know my buddy and I watched it while he was house sitting last year, and we loved it. It might be a difficult one to find, but if you can get it, by all means.

What do you think of when you hear the name Reb Brown? Beefiness combined with screaming, right? And this has all of that. I uploaded the end fight scene with the major baddie (you can check it out on the image page), but I easily could've uploaded seven or eight more. There's the torture montage, which shouldn't have been funny, but was. Or the tearful goodbye where Reb Brown tells a kid all these lies about Disneyland as the kid dies in his arms. Come to think of it, any scene with Reb Brown in it in Strike Commando is great. (I don't want to give away the context of that first image above, but it's equally fantastic.)



This is only the second Bruno Mattei film we've looked at, the first being Robowar-- and both with him credited under the pseudonym "Vincent Dawn". That number will only go up as we swim in more of his circles, but his movies aren't exactly the easiest things to find either. He passed away in 2007, and of his last five or six films, I'm not sure that any were released in the United States. At the very least, we still have Strike Commando II to cover, so we're not done with him yet.

Christopher Connelly plays the bad colonel. If you've watched any TV shows from the 1970s, you'd recognize him. He passed away shortly after this was made, though there were two other films released after his death, Night of the Sharks, co-starring Treat Williams and Antonio Fargas; and Django II, starring Franco Nero and Donald Pleasence-- both films were Italian productions, though neither were directed by Mattei.



The best judge of an action film is how many end fights they have-- and how great they are. This has two-and-a-half, each one better than the first. I uploaded the first one, with big baddie Jakoda. Then he has one against the American that double-crossed him. Then he has a half of one after that against Jakoda, just to finish things off. This is a very important lesson for people who drag their films on. First, if you cut down on the boring early on, you can get away with multiple endings; but second, and most importantly, each one needs to be better than the first. If you're thinking of drawing your film out more, go to Strike Commando for a clinic on how to do it properly.

This can either be purchased on VHS, or is available on a big Grindhouse collection, which the reviews of on Amazon describe it as varying in quality. Really, anyway you do it, this is very worth it. It's some of the best Reb Brown you can ask for.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094059/