That’s right! Don The Dragon Wilson graduates into the world of real movies with his version of Extreme Make Over: Crooked Ex-Cop Edition! The Dragon knows that it’s time to put away the cyborg assassins, the vampire hunter outfits, and the crazy CIA psychic powers to tackle storylines that almost resemble real life issues!

Sure, most of our real lives aren’t spent worrying about our drug-addicted hooker friend or the fact that our SWAT buddies lied to get us kicked off the force, but The Dragon comes from a world where guys run around using the Death Touch on people and villains are called The Hydra.

The Dragon is even loaded down with more ordinary problems including a burgeoning workplace romance and dealing with his ex-wife shacking up with a professional baseball player which causes the Dragon to worry that his connection with his son is going to be lost since his new dad can teach him how to throw a split-fingered fork ball.

Then this guy goes and gets traded to Florida and The Dragon’s old lady starts talking about taking The Dragon’s kid with them!

I didn’t have any problem buying everything else in the movie, but the whole child custody thing was bogus. Really, if you were a 12 year old boy, would you rather hang around some sissy who wears cleats and a cup, or around your kickboxing SWAT team dad?

So how exactly do all these soap opera threads come together to give us The Dragon at his most angst-ridden? Like a lot of us, The Dragon is having problems at work. Tom Sasso is another guy on the SWAT team and feels like he should be the leader.

Sasso complains that the Dragon keeps making all kinds of wrong decisions that put cops’ lives in danger. Sure, The Dragon gets one cop stabbed and his girlfriend blown up, but come on Tom! Everybody has a few bad days at work!

Even though I was dreading watching this movie due to its hideous DVD cover which just screamed “turgid drama about a cop in too deep”, Redemption acted quickly to reassure me that not only was it going to be okay, it was going to set a new standard in Don The Dragon cinema!

You know surly Tom Sasso? Played by Richard Norton! As in Deathfight‘s Richard Norton! And Raiders Of The Sun‘s Richard Norton! And the very same Richard Norton who already fought Don The Dragon at the end of CyberTracker!

So Sasso and The Dragon get it on in a climatic battle that tears apart all of southern California in the last five minutes of the movie, right? Sure. In a movie that sucked!

In a movie that managed to be an awesome Don The Dragon effort while transcending all previous awesome Don The Dragon efforts, Redemption gives you a bare knuckled brawl right at the beginning of the movie in the SWAT team locker room!

The only thing that prevented a lot of guys having their lockers dented in the shape of Sasso’s head was the intervention of fellow martial arts legend Cynthia Rothrock! First Potsdam, now this!

After getting Cynthia blown up, The Dragon’s team turns on him and lies on a report that blames him for her death. The Dragon is forced to resign and into a life of crime. Because he needs cash for a down payment on a house. Because he wants to have a house for when his son visits him in the summer. Because I guess his apartment isn’t cool enough. Seemed to be a bit thin on the motivation front, but it brought the late great Chris Penn to the forefront of the picture, so who frigging cares!

Chris and The Dragon had already worked together in Future Kick and this time around Chris appears as the crime kingpin that The Dragon turns to for a job in an effort to make some quick cash.

While Chris isn’t in the movie much, he owns every scene he is in! His intensity whenever he’s on screen will have you hanging on every cuss word and racial epithet he spews out! During one of his rants, he even manages to name check Cloris Leachman!

One of the great things about Redemption (besides everything!) is that many of the characters don’t follow the expected trajectory. Chris Penn? He and The Dragon never have any big showdown! In fact, they’re pretty much buddy buddy throughout and never have a falling out!

The drug pushing pimp who beats The Dragon’s hooker pal? He and The Dragon never settle up with each other!

And evil Tom Sasso? He has his life saved by The Dragon during the big bank robbery that closes out the film! And acknowledges that maybe The Dragon is okay after all!

Redemption manages to juggle its various plot elements efficiently and if most of them never quite add up to anything (there are no consequences for The Dragon’s life of crime, nothing is resolved as to his child, and the SWAT team’s lies about The Dragon’s conduct is never revealed), well, we can overlook it because we love seeing Chris Penn swear, we love seeing The Dragon doing whatever it takes to get paid, and there’s a nice amount of kicking and killing going on.

Director Art Camacho (Recoil) does manage to irritate with his headache-inducing jerky camera work during some action scenes, but it’s not as awful as the Parkinson’s Cam used in Night Hunter. Besides, I’ll take a little bit of that in an actual movie over the less annoying slow motion used in abysmal juvenile kickbox junk like Red Sun Rising. Consider The Dragon redeemed with this one!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Red Sun Rising is the film where we finally lose our game of Don The Dragon Russian Roulette. Of course in real Russian Roulette, the loser is put out of his misery in a few seconds whereas Red Sun Rising bleeds you to death for over an hour and a half.

The opening scene sets the brain-petrifying tone for the all that is to follow. Don The Dragon plays a half Japanese/half American cop in Japan who’s trying to bring in a bad guy named Yamata. You would think that anything involving Don The Dragon wailing away with a sword when he’s not kickboxing his way through thugs would be yen in the bank. But it isn’t.

In spite of being credited with being something called “Executive in Charge of Fight Action,” Don The Dragon’s battles throughout the film are marked by being slow, poorly photographed, and not all that interesting. The overuse of slow motion during already sluggish fighting is also not recommended.

After his fight in Japan against Yamata that leaves his partner dead, Don The Dragon comes over to the United States four months later to bring Yamata back. Considering that his Japanese superiors blamed him for the loss of his partner because he was only half Japanese and that we have no idea how or why Yamata is in the U.S. anyway, this development makes as much sense as the whole “gang war” storyline that’s clumsily introduced in L.A. in between Don The Dragon’s Japan and U.S. sequences.

It turns out the overused gang angle on is foisted on us to bring Don The Dragon’s mismatched American cop buddy into the film. It’s a woman (Detective Karen) and she doesn’t like Japanese people!

And you know why she doesn’t? Her dad worked at a car plant in Michigan and lost his job when import cars started becoming more popular so he took a job someplace else and got killed during a robbery! So she became a cop and started hating the Japanese!

Don The Dragon hates Americans though because of some good old fashioned prejudice from his American side of the family. But if Don The Dragon is going to ever master the Death Touch so that he can defeat Yamata’s super powered assassin, he’ll have to come to terms with both sides of his heritage! Why? Because that’s what his kung fu master says!

Death Touch? Super powered assassin? Kung fu master? Am I really sure this movie is that bad? The Death Touch is just a guy poking you with his fingers turning different colors accompanied by a weird sound effect. The super powered assassin is a guy who spends a lot of time waving his arms around in people’s faces somehow putting them into a trance despite the fact that the only trance such actions would put anyone in is the sort of trance where you’d laugh in his goofy face.

The assassin also demonstrates how evil he is by breaking into the kung fu master’s house, killing his parakeet, and stealing Detective Karen’s prized pocket watch! He was clearly sending a message. And that message was, I killed your bird and stole a watch, so beware my Death Touch! Especially if you are a bird or a watch!

The most consistently annoying part of the movie was all the really bad dialogue where the characters tried to show how much they hated each other’s culture. None of it was funny (as we always hope racist dialogue is), but what I didn’t really get was how they had Detective Karen repeatedly harassed by a male cop who also constantly made racist comments to Don The Dragon. Obviously, we were supposed to hate that guy. Fine. But the problem is that when this guy wasn’t saying rotten stuff to Don The Dragon, Detective Karen was saying similarly racist things to him instead!

But I was supposed to like her! Why? Because she was played Terry Farrell of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fame! It’s Dax! Surely, it’s just that alien parasite living inside of her that made her spew such vitriol! Watching her play a tough racist cop who gets put on suspension, gets it on with Don The Dragon, and survives the Death Touch had me thinking that the whole freaking movie was just some massive Holodeck malfunction!

The off-putting characters we’re supposed to like (even the kung fu master is too cutesy for his own good), the barely existent action, the muddled plot involving selling weapons, inciting a gang war, crooked cops, and the cheesy karate powers occasionally displayed (smoke bombs, invisible forces knocking people down, the trance that made Dax hot and bothered and the not-quite-Death Touch) all serve to make this movie a skip at all costs affair. I don’t think Geordi ever caused a Holodeck disaster this bad, even when he was trying to get laid!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The Dragon plays an Interpol agent who, along with his partner, attempts to thwart the sale of a computer disc which is uber important because it contains some algorithm that can decrypt every computer security system or code or whatever in the whole universe!

I was a little fuzzy on how this would work in practice, but the bad guy had a bunch of Indian guys working it out on their computers with the intent of performing the ultimate bank heist! And we all know from calling American companies’ tech support lines how good those Indians are with computers!

Something goes horribly wrong though! And by that I mean of course that something goes horribly right for the audience!

While trying to defuse a bomb that the greasy pony-tailed villain Davaad set up in the museum where the deal was going down, The Dragon’s partner blows himself and the museum up!

Prodigious genre director Fred Olen Ray shows a nice sense of how these movies are supposed to work by giving us a sizable explosion in the opening minutes of the film. And he even follows it up by having The Dragon’s boss saying he can’t work the case of his partner’s death because it’s too personal! Next stop for The Dragon? A “vacation” in India! What? Davaad is also in Inidia? What a freakish coincidence!

The Dragon is in India for all of about forty seconds before he beats up a bunch of thugs, gets busted by the cops, told to vacate the country, hit on by a hotel employee and gets a Indian cop for a partner that’s sympathetic to his revenge mission!

Maybe I’m just a worrywart, but I’m not sure it’s the smartest thing in the world to partner up with a guy who’s still trying to settle up for getting his last partner killed.

But maybe I’m wrong in this case. What’s that? The Indian cop gets his neck snapped and thrown through some glass? Oh well, it’ll kick The Dragon’s revenge level up a notch, so it wasn’t like his death was in vain or anything.

In addition to his new partner, The Dragon gets himself mixed up with a couple of dames. One is a blonde chick who appears to be artificially augmented both above and below the neck.

The Dragon believes she’s with MI6 because she says so and ends up double-crossed for his efforts. In The Dragon’s defense though, that was a pretty tricky maneuver, you know, just kind of saying you’re a secret agent and all. Who could’ve guessed she was lying?

The Dragon also hooks up with Miss India 1990 who turns out to be the daughter of a local crime boss, but is a local crime boss who is opposed to Davaad and his boss, The Hydra. The Hydra? Is this a Nick Fury comic from the 1960s?

Who is The Hydra? I could tell you, but then I would be forced to throw up in my mouth a little, so I won’t do either. It’s played like it’s a big surprise, which of course means that it isn’t.

Thankfully, the movie doesn’t linger a long time on any particular sequence which is good because some of the things that happen would really be sucky if they stretched on for a significant amount of time.

Like the three love scenes. You know what would have been a real turn on? If the blonde chick kept her clothes on. The Dragon was really earning his paycheck when he was rolling around with her. He also had a silly bit where he and Miss India were all wet and groping each other. Even The Hyrda got some ass!

It’s evident that Fred Olen Rey is rooted in the more general exploitation film making tradition, then in the more traditional kickfighting movie ethos which dictate that the only boobs I’ll have to see are those of the kickboxing champion during a big match!

One of the movie’s more climatic moments also rang a bit false for a variety of reasons. The bad guys had begun uploading the information on the disk to somewhere and there was a timer counting down so that a bomb would go off once the upload was complete.

Without commenting on whether that would be possible, I would suggest that it would be impossible to believe The Dragon could sit down at the computer and start cracking the password. But he does! He just flashes back to something innocuous The Hydra said previously and bang! Password accepted!

But the real issue I had was all the sweaty palms over stopping the upload in the first place. You know how I would have done it? Unplugged the data connection. It’s kind of hard to upload anything without a connection to anywhere.

Technical quibbles aside, Operation Cobra goes down pretty easy. The Dragon has lots of fights and though they aren’t terribly involved, he does manage to nail two guys in the head with a single kick!

There’s also a nifty scene where the blonde chick is fighting Miss India and the blonde chick does a flying kick only to have Miss India duck leaving Blondie to go flying off a balcony to her slow, agonizing, and twitching death!

The final confrontation between The Dragon and The Hydra isn’t as epic as a fight between a dragon and hydra probably would be in real life, but The Dragon does throw a chain in The Hydra’s face and everyone gets shot. Kind of hard to argue with those results!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

These vampires are always swishing their romance novel cover long hair around, resplendent in their European finery and prone to mucking about with goblets and come hither looks any normal broad would laugh off.

There’s also usually talk about vampire families that date back hundreds of years and how powerful they all are. If they’re really so powerful, why are they generally unknown to the world at large and getting killed by vampire hunters who couldn’t possibly have all the resources that these supposedly old, well-connected families have had centuries to build up?

I’m also not buying the concept that these vampires are getting ready to take over the world. If they’ve been around for hundreds of years and haven’t gotten it done yet, I’m not going to lose any sleep over the latest announcement of a plot to enslave humanity. Besides, if I’m still getting football on the weekends, what do I care who’s in charge?

And Wesley Snipes? To put my loathing of Wesley in perspective, I would rather see a movie about kickboxing champion Don “The Dragon” Wilson hunting vampires than anything Wesley has ever done. I wouldn’t even mind if that movie was directed by the guy that gave us Michael Dudikoff’s Strategic Command!

Night Hunter feebly attempts to tell the tale of vampire hunter Jack Cutter. Cutter has the ability to sense vampires (at least he says he does – there isn’t any explanation beyond that) and comes from a long line of vampire hunters.

He uses a handy-dandy guide book to vampire families that his dad gave him and wastes several bloodsuckers in a restaurant. As it happens, there’s still a few more out there and they’re irked that their friends have been killed by Cutter. The police are also irked and are after Cutter as well.

Even worse for the audience, a nosy reporter has been dispatched to harass Cutter and to be the potential bride for the head vampire. (When this vampire first sees the reporter and has a flashback to a time years ago where he was wearing a powdered wig and she was his bride, I died a little. Okay, I actually died a whole freaking lot!)

I don’t really feel comfortable saying that Don “The Dragon” Wilson was horrible in this since the part required him to do nothing but kick and shoot people and to alternate scowls with vacant stares. I also don’t feel justified criticizing him because he was dressed up like The Crow minus the make up!

After all, what better way to hunt down vampires during the daytime in the heat of L.A. than dressed all in black complete with boots and trench coat? And if you’re constantly on the move, fighting to the death with the world’s most powerful monsters, shouldn’t you have really long, perfectly styled hair that you have to brush out of your face?

Once Cutter figures out there’s more vampires to hunt down, the movie follows his investigation into their location. His investigation consists of Cutter just showing up where the vampires are, fighting, shooting, and finally snapping either their necks or backs.

It’s a race against time since there’s an eclipse scheduled for later in the week and everyone knows that when there’s an eclipse, vampires can breed! That must explain why one of the vampires is hanging out at a party that Cutter has to crash!<>

Generally in movies like this, I rest my eyes during the filler scenes between the outbursts of violence I’m paying to vicariously experience. Thanks to director Rick Jacobson’s innovative use of the Parkinson’s Cam though, I had to close my eyes whenever a fight scene broke out!

What is Parkinson’s Cam? Parkinson’s Cam is where as soon as a fight scene starts, the camera begins to jerk uncontrollably, presumably to simulate how frenetic the action is. What it isn’t simulating is how real it’s making me have seizures! When Parkinson’s Cam was being used in combination with blinking lights, I could actually feel my brain being damaged!

If Parkinson’s Cam wasn’t awesome enough, you also got doses of fast editing, and spinning camera work, particularly when a vampire was running circles around Cutter. If you can manage not to pass out during the action scenes you’ll be rewarded with Cutter slamming a window closed on a vampire’s neck and another guy getting heaved off the roof of a building. We even get to see the dummy land!

All in all, a terrible effort from the stupid prologue showing Cutter as a boy with his parents holed up in an abandoned house where his professional vampire hunter parents are tricked into letting in a traitor, to the lady vampire with the French accent who is always trying to get into catfights with the reporter, to the cop that helps Cutter out by wearing his SWAT hat backwards for no reason and gets himself shot. Still, much better than if Snipes had been in it.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Considering the positively abominably silly possibilities of forcing The Dragon to actually practice law in a movie, Out For Blood does a good job of not really letting his occupation as attorney have anything to do with the movie. The Dragon’s legal beagle stuff is confined to him wearing a shirt and tie and eyeglasses while sitting in his office once or twice and asking for a case file. He also beats up two thugs at a courthouse.

All in all, I think you’d agree that this is precisely the type of lawyer stuff we want from The Dragon. And what we want even more and thankfully get is to have The Dragon’s family brutally murdered right before his eyes!

It was going to be the perfect weekend! The Dragon, Mrs. Dragon, Dragon, Jr., and The Dragon’s dog are all hanging out at the docks in the middle of the night (they have a boat there) when they find themselves right smack dab in the middle of a big drug deal!

Through the overuse of hazy flashbacks throughout the movie we see The Dragon desperately trying to remember what happened that night to his family. He knows they were viciously killed right before his eyes, but he doesn’t know who did it!

The Dragon though isn’t content to just pound back homemade memory pills provided by his shady psychologist and wait around for the world’s biggest and stupidest coincidences to unravel the plot for him! He’s bound and determined to kill the middle part of the movie by prowling the city streets killing drug dealers as local vigilante, Karate Man!

Karate Man is pretty cruddy as far as heroes go. He’s just The Dragon in a black sweatsuit and The Dragon does absolutely nothing to hide his face even while doing his business in front of witnesses!

Still, he did punch a guy clean off a roof. And killed a guy by force feeding him a bag of cocaine. And caused two guys to get set on fire when Karate Man rammed a van into their drug lab. He also shot a bunch of guys. Come to think of it, Karate Man was actually pretty awesome!

Now just because Karate Man is out trying to avenge his family’s death, doesn’t mean that he also can’t find time to avenge the boner in his pants. Thus he hooks up with a local art dealer named Joanna.

She knows his psychologist and is also mixed up with a local mobster. Her previous boyfriend also turned up dead and it was supposedly a suicide, but the cop (Lt. Croft) harassing The Dragon during the movie about his Karate Man antics advises that they were investigating her for murdering him! That particular plot element is never resolved, but what does The Dragon care? He wasn’t THAT boyfriend!

Out For Blood is a pretty routine Don The Dragon effort, not as good as CyberTracker or Blackbelt, but it won’t leave you concussed like Red Sun Rising or Moving Target. Still, the last third of it is filled with twists and turns that don’t make sense except that they need to occur so that The Dragon can wrap things up with a big finish.

The bad guys kidnap his girlfriend and rely on the old “let’s hope The Dragon manages to hear this phone message in time so that he knows where to go for the final showdown” gimmick.

It’s a particularly punch-drunk strategy in this case since if you want to lure The Dragon somewhere to kill him and you decide to leave a message at his girlfriend’s house, why don’t you just stake out the girlfriend’s house and kill him there when he goes to check her answering machine, which they apparently are relying on him to do anyway?<>

Even if you can overlook that, it’s difficult to explain why when The Dragon shows up at the airfield where the bad guys are holding his girlfriend that they just don’t mow him down with their various guns. Instead, they have one guy get into a kick fight with The Dragon while everyone else stands around watching!

And then the head bad guy appears and explains everything for no reason other than the movie needed to explain the horribly obvious doublecross. Of course, the doublecross makes no sense either! Why did the bad guy kill The Dragon’s family, but let him live? And why haven’t they killed him yet at the airfield?

The Dragon made this movie for PM Entertainment and it’s at the end of the movie when PM suddenly seems to remember that they are involved because we finally get a decent chase scene and explosion.

It all comes to a stupefyingly stuntacular conclusion when the bad guy suddenly ends up in an old World War II era fighter plane with The Dragon chasing after him in a jeep. The Dragon even manages to jump onto a wing!

Again, what was the bad guy’s plan here? Had he planned to fly off in this plane from the very beginning? Why? And what about the rest of his crew? If it was all improvised, why was there a pilot with a gassed up plane just sitting there waiting to take off when there had just been about an hour of continuous gunfire at the airfield?

By the time Joanna’s mobster friend appears to get involved and Lt. Croft tells The Dragon that they’ve decided that Karate Man was actually a good idea and they want to work with him, you’re left feeling a bit like you were Karate Man’s most recent victim.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Don “The Dragon” Wilson plays Future Kick, a cyborg who makes his living bringing in criminals for the reward money. Future Kick also was called Walker, but that was clearly his slave name. Plus, I rather doubt I would have ever bothered with the movie if it had been called Walker Kick. Don has all the credentials to convincingly play Future Kick since he’s the 88 time World Whup Ass Light Heavyweight Champion and is internationally recognized as the only man to make nearly as many Bloodfist movies.

In fact, Future Kick (the movie, not the cyborg) makes sure we know why Don is so believable when he speaks his 20 or so lines with all the conviction of a man-made machine by crediting him at the beginning of the film as: Don “The Dragon” Wilson, World Kickboxing Association, World Light Heavyweight Champion. That was a smart move by the filmmakers because it reassured the audience that their kickboxing cyborg movie was the real deal. Before I saw that credit, I was worried that Don “The Dragon” Wilson might have gone to the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Sure, they have a good rep, but their kickboxing curriculum is pretty weak.

But what sort of messed up future is this where cyborgs kick stuff? Have all the warnings from the anti-American, pro-terrorist Democrat tree huggers finally come to pass? Has the Earth gone into that Thundarr the Barbarian apocalypse predicted by the global warming Chicken Littles of the socialist left? Has a strange new world risen from the old? A world of savagery, super science, and sorcery and actors driving around in hybrid cars? I wish! Thundarr was cool!

What actually happened is related by one of those helpful all knowing narrators these sorts of movies use to spare us dialogue-heavy scenes with kickboxing champions. There was a bunch of wars. The rich people moved to the moon. Then the giant corporations overthrew governments on Earth and took control.

The corporations created cyborgs like Future Kick to fight crime and maintain control. The cyborgs decided that corporate crime was the worst of all so the corporations created the Corporate Police to hunt down and execute the cyborgs (for some reason called cyberons). I’m sure it all made sense if you were a kickboxing champ who had been kicked in the head a lot times.

In case that wasn’t all convoluted enough, there’s a guy on the moon who is a programmer of virtual reality stuff and he decides to come to New Los Angeles on Earth to get some information about this business called New Body.

New Body promises a service where they replace your old crappy body parts with new ones. This is accomplished by a highly advanced super science called “killing people and harvesting their vital organs.” What this had to do with a rich guy on the moon who makes video games, I don’t know, but it involved a stolen computer disc so I was hooked.

Bang (Chris Penn) and Hynes (some nobody) acquire the body parts for New Body via this claw-shaped bladed weapon they use to rip the hearts out of people. Once they do that, they use a rather advanced scientific invention called a Ziploc Bag to put the heart into.

Hynes also does some pro bono dismemberment when he decapitates a guy with a fire escape ladder, providing some welcome gore to go along with all the welcome kickboxing. Future Kick also gets his finger torn off in a fight! Good thing his name was Future Kick and not Future Punch!

Bang and Hynes don’t like rich computer programmers from the moon sniffing around their business so they kill this guy and recover the stolen disc. They also kill a variety of other people somehow involved. All of this would end this 75 minute movie about forty minutes early and without the necessity of Future Kick powering on except that the computer programmer has a snoopy wife who just has to know who killed her husband.

Snoopy Wife teams up with Future Kick since Future Kick had previously been approached by the dead husband and mainly since Snoopy Wife offered Future Kick $500,000. I honestly don’t recall that Future Kick did much in the way of anything beyond periodically getting into fights with Bang and Hynes who for some reason thought Snoopy Wife was a threat. What was the big deal? The cops were on the take and New Los Angeles was controlled by the corporations so who was going to listen to anything she had to say?

And just to make sure we don’t forget that Future Kick is a wanted man, the Corporate Police make half-hearted attempts to kill him every once in awhile. (If Future Kick was really the fugitive everyone says he is, how is he able to turn in a captured criminal to the police and get the reward money? Maybe it’s some of kind of kickboxing power which clouds men’s minds.)

Future Kick and Snoopy Wife race through New Los Angeles in a search for the shocking truth that ultimately leads to a conclusion so startling the viewer actually groans out loud! Groans with ecstasy of course! Because in a future where cyborgs in sunglasses do all our kicking, the only reality is the reality that is real!

Surely, there must be a reason that New Los Angeles consists entirely of one rubble-strewn street and one scuzzy, poorly lit strip club! Well, beyond budget constraints that is. And what possible escape can there be for Future Kick and Snoopy Wife when they find themselves trapped in a deadly game of LaserBlade as the corporate police close in! My God! It’s almost like it was all the product of an insecure wife’s overheated mind and a virtual reality program that still has a few bugs in it! Or of Roger Cormans’s Concorde-New Horizons production company.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Three long years after the events in the first CyberTracker film, Eric, Connie, and Jared return to do battle once again with evil cyborgs who are charged with enforcing the law, but have this disconcerting habit of being used to kill innocent people and assassinate politicians. The stakes are even higher though this time around because the Cyber-Trackers come in all sorts of awesome flavors!

There’s your regular old Cyber-Tracker that you’ll recall from the first film. He’s a bald guy who wears a leather motorcycle jacket for no reason. It’s the same bald guy as before, but even within this “regular” Cyber-Tracker model, you’ve got upgrades that have you experiencing a cybergasm before you can freaking stop yourself!

Tracker 9, the machine that saves Eric’s life at the beginning of the film and plays an important role at the end, is decked out all in metal, but more importantly has weapons where his hands should be, including a chain gun!

I have never in my life seen an occasion where a chain gun was anything other than a recipe for a welcome overdose of desensitizing and indiscriminate violence! And don’t think for a minute that Tracker 9 doesn’t leave any ammo left in his elbow either! This is a PM Entertainment film after all!

Cyber-Tracker 2 could have coasted to an easy win after Tracker 9 dispensed his unceasing extreme prejudice against scofflaws and no one could fault it if it did. The fact that they went to the effort of dressing up a guy in full cyborg regalia, weaponized him beyond all recognition and turned him loose in the first fifteen minutes of the movie is more than even I expected. And, yeah, I was expecting to have my ass kicked by all the Cyber Tracker/Don “The Dragon” Wilson action, but I was not prepared to have it kicked straight into the Andromeda Galaxy!

But that’s precisely what happened when evil businessman Paris Morgan unveiled his new and improved Cyber-Trackers! Behold! I give you the Connie Tracker and the Eric Tracker! Evil robotic doubles of the most famous anti-Tracker terrorist/news reporter and the toughest Secret Service agent ever? I just uploaded in my leather pants!

Now, I’m just a guy who likes to see other jacked up guys kicking each other in the face, so I’m not really well versed on all this big business stuff, but I couldn’t quite figure out why in the world a guy who is looking to assassinate the governor would try to implicate a well known newscaster who is married to a bad ass cop, both of whom battled Trackers in the past, by using Tracker doubles of them.

Wouldn’t it have caused less problems if you just used some anonymous guy who wasn’t going to destroy the entire city trying to clear his name? And if you’ve got this mega-technology available to you, why would you use it to kill a governor?

All that though is just what we in the legal field call a technicality because it doesn’t really matter whether the initial plan made any sense, it’s how much carnage is caused by all involved once the plan is put into action! And you can damn sure bet that everyone associated with this brings their A game to this Z budgeted picture!

Director Richard Pepin (Firepower, CyberTracker, Dark Breed) must have gotten a really sweet deal on a bunch of old cars and explosives because he just blows the piss out of everything he can get his hands on in this one! Even by the usually spectacularly destructive standards of a PM Entertainment film (Rage, Riot, the three previous Pepin films mentioned), Cyber-Tracker 2 stands out.

Right from the beginning of the movie during a sting operation Don The Dragon is running on some counterfeiters, you’ve got cars exploding, Don diving out of the way in slow motion multiple times, warehouses blowing up, guys on fire, countless thugs and cops getting shot, and even a little bit of kickfighting! Sure, it didn’t have anything to do with the main story, but a fourth of the movie is over before you can even catch your breath!

Then you’ve got a couple of car chases that end with vehicles sailing through the air, exploding for no reason and crashing and rolling on the ground in slow motion! And one of the car chases features Don The Dragon driving a Hummer he stole from a Tracker while the Tracker goes after him in an armored car he stole! And there’s even some kind of grenade launcher thing mounted on the back of the Hummer that Don The Dragon unloads on the armored car with!

Even sweeter is a police station massacre ripped from The Terminator, but like times a thousand! Heck, that one ends with the Don The Dragon Tracker tearing the arm off another Tracker and knocking it’s head clean off!

In looking back on Cyber-Tracker 2, I’m not sure how they could have squeezed that much action into three movies, let alone one!

There’s a showdown with the Don The Dragon Tracker at an old church which is being used as a hideout by an explosives expert named Tripwire that somehow involves everyone running through miles of steam tunnels! But even that isn’t the end of things!

How about a kickboxing battle to the finish between Don The Dragon and Paris Morgan who just happened to be one of the best ex-CIA special forces guys ever before he became a mercenary? And I don’t even have time to give you the lowdown on SuperTracker, the deadliest Tracker of them all!

And like all perfectly realized action movies, Cyber-Tracker 2 ends on an up note with everyone laughing as Tracker 9 finally calls Don The Dragon by his first name! Oh Tracker 9! You and that chain gun are simply too much!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Much like the Jeff Speakman flick Scorpio One which had the Perfect Weapon take on Brent Huff of Strike Commando 2 fame, Cyber Tracker creams the undiscerning action audience’s jeans with the mouth watering showdown between Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Richard “The Kick Fighter With A Mullet” Norton.

If it doesn’t stack up to the fight on the space station between Speakman and Huff where Speakman smacked Huff in the head with a fire extinguisher, that just goes to show that when you have such legends brawling, the edge often comes down the intangibles. Intangibles like space stations and fire extinguishers.

Just because Cyber Tracker doesn’t have the foresight to fire its stars into orbit where they can duke it out with fire extinguishers doesn’t mean that Cyber Tracker is all thumbs when it comes to the whole ass kicking/fire safety angle.

First of all, Cyber Tracker takes place in the future! The future is sort of like being in a space station, but on Earth! For instance, The Dragon’s apartment is outfitted with a computer that talks to him and can even simulate being drunk. Even better is that his pad is outfitted with video cameras that record everything that goes on inside!

Have you ever wanted to relive that moment when your old lady told you that you were a no good loser and that she’d rather be gang banged by a bus full of syphilitic retards on Viagra? Of course! That’s the sort of inspiration some of us need to get on with our lives! It also helps a Secret Service agent like The Dragon stay haunted!

The Dragon’s old lady isn’t nearly as colorful as our purely theoretical example, complaining instead about worrying if The Dragon is going to get killed on the job! Frankly, I think that’s a more humiliating complaint than our purely theoretical (no – really, I just made it up!) example since she’s basically saying, “I don’t think you’re bad ass enough!”

We all know that The Dragon was really just with her though because her line reading made us simultaneously think that she very well could be an undercover Cyber Tracker and that The Dragon wasn’t really the worst performer in the movie.

And really, to be fair to The Dragon, it’s not exactly like the rest of the cast were spending time between scenes of them standing around shooting at leather-clad androids polishing their award acceptance speeches. Well, except for Jared (Steven Burton). You could tell by the way he wore his wife beater and kept getting in The Dragon’s face that he would soon be winning Emmys and Soap Opera Digest Awards for his work on General Hospital.

So why exactly is an actor as obviously talented as Steve Burton mixing it up with The Dragon in the first place? I can only imagine that the opportunity to appear in a movie that combined the best parts of Robocop (robot cops killing scum) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (robots in leather) was too freaking good to pass up! Plus, what better opportunity to get Richard Norton to autograph your VHS copy of Deathfight?

But what exactly is all this Cyber Tracker business? And how does The Dragon and Norton figure into things? What place do a couple of old school kickboxers have in a future full of robots and award-winning soap opera actors?

The Dragon is working the security detail of a senator who is connected to a company that makes the Cyber Trackers. The Cyber Trackers are robots that run around killing suspected criminals. This cuts down on a lot of the paperwork the regular human cops have to falsify whenever they kill suspects. It also is a real money saver since police departments no longer have to budget for all those extra “throw down guns” they need to have on hand to keep the shootings of unarmed civilians righteous.

Norton is The Dragon’s boss and doesn’t like how The Dragon showed him up during an assassination attempt. He also doesn’t trust The Dragon. Can The Dragon be counted on to tow the company line when he finds out the lengths the company is willing to go to in an effort to cover up its super secret Echo project? Will the The Dragon be able to put aside how haunted he is by his ex to shack up with the sexy terrorist leader/star TV reporter/expert hacker? And most important of all, will The Dragon finish the movie before wandering off to do another Bloodfist film?

Okay, I know you’re saying “that’s sounds pretty stupid and/or non-interesting, but are there enough cars and helicopters exploding and guys getting shot to justify watching this more than five or six times? Let me answer you this way: Director Richard Pepin (Fire Power, Dark Breed, Hologram Man) is also the “P” in PM Entertainment. Did visions of cars flying through the air and blowing up just hurtle across your synapses?

There’s no point in cataloging all the damage that one butch android and The Dragon can do, but remember how we bemoaned the fact that Scorpio One had one up on this film because it had a great scene where Speakman clubbed Huff with a fire extinguisher? Cyber Tracker says, why bother with a fire extinguisher when you can use the whole fudging fire truck!

When The Dragon carjacked the fire truck in his bid to escape a Cyber Tracker, by the time I was thinking that no way do they blow up the fire truck, I see The Dragon bailing out and that big mother is flying through the air after hitting a car parked inexplicably in the middle of the road!

Whatever else is awesome about Cyber Tracker (Norton and The Dragon punching each other again and again, questionable design flaw in Cyber Tracker that allows The Dragon to shove a grenade inside of it, The Dragon’s girlfriend quoting Ayn Rand) I’ve already had the exploding fire truck added to the montage of straight-to-video action clips that I’m having played at my funeral!

© 2008 MonsterHunter

Seriously, I would be watching this movie, mentally noting all the great things that were happening when all of a sudden, BAM! I couldn’t remember them anymore! It was almost as if the awesome things that must have occurred in The Capitol Conspiracy (also known as The Prophet) never happened at all!

But that was impossible since this was another team up between The Dragon and Fred Olen Ray following up their Operation Cobra which never failed to entirely not be as bad as you would have guessed!

It wasn’t like The Dragon and Fred tried to do anything much different this second time around. Another sub 90 minute film that moved briskly from one outbreak of violence to another without delay, a unlimited buffet of nameless thugs for The Dragon to break in half and shoot, and a scene of a building exploding that was first seen in Operation Cobra!

Fred even manages to shoehorn in his trademark “The Dragon gets ass” scene, when The Dragon and his surly, butch partner spend three or four minutes caressing each other’s naked bods! So how did it go so wrong?

Maybe it didn’t! After all, I might just be parroting something that The Dragon hypnotized me into saying! Who can really know since The Dragon’s magic powers come and go depending on the demands of the plot!

It’s thanks to Uncle Sam that The Dragon has himself some of that remote viewing ability that was all the rage in the late 1960s. He was part of an experiment by the feds where a bunch of orphans were somehow given this psychic ability which was going to be used to locate POW camps in Nam.

It didn’t really work out and some of you out there would probably point to such a harebrained scheme as to why we lost the war. WRONG! We didn’t lose nothing! That’s all liberal loser talk and real Americans know it!

You can damn sure bet that if the lefties, feminists, and tree huggers weren’t running the Red, White, and Blue down all the time and let The Dragon and his scrappy band of orphan mindhunters do their freaking jobs, we probably would have been spared all those Missing In Action movies!

The Dragon wouldn’t want us playing the blame game though, regardless of how much the pinkos ruined this great republic, so we find ourselves in the present when all the orphans have grown up and have begun experiencing side effects like headaches, flashbacks, and loose stools. The Dragon is now a CIA agent who has been assigned a mission to go and bring the others back to the Company for questioning.

And since this wouldn’t be much of a movie without the customary doublecrossing, backstabbing, hidden agendas, and plain pointless lying, The Dragon is told these five people are all suspected of being the leaders of a dangerous international cult. And they all live in southern California! Hey, The Dragon’s mental power is remote viewing, not common sense!

The local crabby partner he has to team up with practically has “murderous traitor” scrawled across her oversized jugs right from the get go. The Dragon though doesn’t figure any of this out, not even when she explains that she had to shoot a docile housewife because she shot her first. In an effort to sell this lame story to The Dragon, she points to the superficial flesh wound on her arm. I’ve had worse wounds cutting my face shaving! And I never shot anybody because of it!

If The Dragon doesn’t have enough problems with his partner killing the people he’s trying to bring in whenever his back is turned, some meanies in the CIA have also sent out a team of agents to kill him, too!

At some point in all this, his rotten partner offers a feeble explanation why she hadn’t killed him yet, but by this time The Dragon had wised up and was beating her unconscious with the clip of her own gun! Then he left her in a heap and we never saw her again!

This also happened with the head of the hit squad sent after him. The Dragon threw him off a train and there was no more mention of him. It didn’t even look like he landed that hard!

The Dragon does plenty of fighting, runs around here and there, busts up a biker bar, and brawls atop the aforementioned train, but it was all kind of executed in a rather blah manner. The train didn’t look like it was hardly moving at all and there wasn’t a strong enough villain to really get a good showdown with.

The guy he fought on the train was notable only for his fake-looking teeth. It made me long for the idiotic hand gestures and Death Touch of the tool The Dragon fought in Red Sun Rising.

The anti-climatic ending features Italian film legend Barbara Steele (Nightmare Castle, Black Sunday) for some reason and I still wasn’t sure why she was wanting to kill all these people. Why not just leave them be?

There was one guy that had hacked into the government database and knew their pasts, but just send a hit squad to kill him and forget the rest.

And why involve The Dragon? These movies are always picking the most dangerous and morally upright guy on the planet to do some dopey evil plan and then get upset when he turns against them and kicks a new hole in their ass!

The whole remote viewing thing is unconvincing and is barely fleshed out in a few flashbacks and some exposition. The Dragon sometimes had some Spidey sense that helped him and sometimes it didn’t.

The standard action, sub-standard story, and a forgettable cast, all combine to put this on the lower end of The Dragon’s cinema spectrum. Utterly lacking in any standout moments, good, bad or otherwise, The Capitol Conspiracy is a painless mindwipe of 83 minutes of your life.

© 2011 MonsterHunter