No longer is Thunder hampered by holding down a full time job as a sheriff’s deputy where his avenging time might be taken up by foiling bank robberies or rousting transvestites that are sleeping off last night’s drag ball in the local warehouse! His sole occupation is single-minded maniacal payback!

Mark Gregory returns again as the Indian who just wants to stare vacantly around his Arizona hometown, but every white guy in the state insists on discriminating against him and wrecking whatever is important to him at that moment!

You would think that after Thunder destroyed his hometown two previous times that the last thing the townies would do is so much as lose a piece of Thunder’s mail. But here they are again riding around in the desert, shooting wild horses, chasing after little Indian kids and blowing up the shanty town village where Thunder lives!

If everyone in town is a moron (including Thunder for constantly coming back), one guy has finally demonstrated some smarts as we find that Bo Svenson is no longer the sheriff after two tours of duty that saw his jail demolished twice and several thousand of his department’s police cars obliterated.

Taking his place as the “name” actor in the movie is John Philip Law who plays the new sheriff. He settles in nicely to the role and clearly subscribes to the “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of replacement acting as his sheriff is exactly the same as Bo’s. He doesn’t want any trouble, but he also will grudgingly enforce the law. At least once Thunder has left half the town a smoking crater.

After the bad guys terrorize his community, drag Thunder behind their truck (it’s no big deal to Thunder since that already happened to him in Thunder), and whip him, Thunder turns to the sheriff for help. He shows the sheriff his whip marks and presents a bill for $56,000 that he wants the bad guys to pay back!

Without any hard evidence though that it was this group of upstanding citizens that use their weekends to practice genocide, there’s nothing that can be done. Well, nothing that can be done by a paleface sheriff!

Thunder then embarks on his hour long rampage. He trashes a guy’s classic car. He trashes and burns a guy’s store. He even blows up a bunch of used cars!

In one of his best bits of carnage, he pulls up to a gas station and starts filling up a trash can! At first I thought Thunder was just too stupid to realize that the gas went in his truck, but then he chucks a lit cigar into the trash can as he pulls away, causing conflagration that likes of which we haven’t seen since a gas station was blown up in the first Thunder movie!

Thunder’s wife makes an appearance long enough only to be kidnapped and used as bait, but things go horribly awry for kidnappers when Thunder shows up with a tribe of Indian warriors to free her!

Some may question where these guys were earlier when Thunder was on the warpath and where they disappear to later when Thunder makes his final assault on the bad guys, but it isn’t like Thunder can’t handle all this himself anyway. Besides, what would you rather watch? A bunch of Indians riding around town on some stupid horses or Thunder jumping cars in the middle of street on his dirt bike?

The Thunder trilogy comes to satisfying conclusion as Thunder gets in a car chase on his dirt bike with the leaders of the local thugs who started this whole business. Jumps are inexplicably made, almost as if anytime a car got in Thunder’s way, the car came equipped with a ramp!

Cars are destroyed and Thunder almost kills a fat guy hiding in a coffin before the sheriff allows Thunder to steal the proceeds from the church fundraiser that was held for the local shopping center. Despite the fundraiser appearing as if it would’ve have lucky to raise ten bucks from the hot dogs it was selling, Thunder is somehow able to hand over stacks of hundred dollar bills to his people for rebuilding!

The usual non-performance by Gregory and the mindless destructive violence you come to expect from this series are both here. Director Fabrizio De Angelis stumbles a bit with his horrid use of exploding and burning models in some scenes and it makes you wish that he had consulted with Antonio Margheriti (Ark Of The Sun God, Jungle Raiders) on how not to embarrass himself when using them.

Still, Fabrizio redeems himself with utterly pointless scenes like when two deputies stumble upon a topless sunbather while going after Thunder’s kid sidekick. There’s also the silly scheme where one of the bad guy’s shoots himself in an effort to claim his gang was provoked into going OK Corral on Thunder’s house while Thunder hid inside. If Thunder is a wanted man for destroying most of the town, how is it that the bad guys can just go out to his house and find him?

A bit of a retread of the first movie, but with Thunder using different vehicles and weapons (a baseball bat instead of a bazooka? Are we having budget problems?), Thunder III gives us exactly what we want from Thunder: loads of hate-fueled emotionless Mark Gregory induced violence executed in a slightly different way each time, but maintaining a high volume of car wrecks!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

And he’s assigned to the very hometown he single-handedly destroyed in the first movie! Working side by side with the very cops that tried to kill him! But everyone has agreed to let bygones be bygones and not to frame Thunder for murder and drug running until the middle of the film!

Everything you went on the warpath for in the original Thunder is back! Fleets of cop cars are annihilated in every conceivable fashion! They get rammed in car chases, they get smashed by semis running roadblocks, they race up ramps and bust through fences, they crash off roads into ravines, and they of course get blown up!

But it isn’t like this is just the same old Thunder with his bazooka! That was so 1983! The 1986 post-Rambo:First Blood Part II Thunder is equipped with crossbow that shoots exploding arrows! Don’t lie and claim your tomahawk didn’t just stand at attention when you heard that!

And the storyline that director Fabrizio De Angelis and co-writer Dardano Sacchetti dreamed up is so much more intense than the relatively routine (but awesome) revenge story of the first movie. Crooked cop Rusty is working with a biker gang (which just by coincidence Thunder beat up at a diner during the beginning of the film) to sell drugs to the local Indians. Thunder starts nosing around and after Rusty kills his biker partner, he sets up Thunder to take the rap! Thunder is sent to prison and must survive the dreaded sweet box, before making his escape to take revenge!

Now, isn’t that better than some guy running around the hills all pissed over a couple of tipped over tombstones? Sure it is! And Fabrizio squeezes all sorts of spectacular action and drama from it! Like the elaborate scheme to put Thunder in the big house!

Some guy says Thunder killed the biker, they look in Thunder’s locker immediately after the accusation and there’s a couple of pounds of drugs just sitting in there! Because crooked cops always store their stolen illegal drugs in their locker at the station house!

Luckily, Thunder has a friend who is an attorney. Unluckily, his attorney is a sweaty fat drunk guy who seems to be only to secure a cruddy house for Thunder and his wife at the beginning of the movie! It is perhaps understandable then that Thunder files his own “appeal” by shooting a guard at the prison, stealing a cop car and busting on out in spectacular fashion!

Wait a minute? Thunder has a wife? You bet and she’s pregnant! Uh-oh! I hope she doesn’t do anything stupid like go riding around in a jeep with Thunder and his attorney while the evil Rusty is playing sniper from a helicopter following them!

Just to give you a sense of the attorney’s legal skills, he announces that there’s no cause for concern when Rusty is spotted following them because Thunder is riding with his lawyer! And really, there isn’t any cause for concern, unless you happen to be pregnant and the jeep gets blasted causing it roll on its side!

In a scene reminiscent of the one where baby Superman lifted that car off Pa Kent, Thunder uses his Indian super powers to lift the jeep off his old lady! And it’s accompanied by loving shots of Mark Gregory’s obscenely bulging biceps! Thunderlicious!

Thunder isn’t finished yet though! He manages to lasso the helicopter and proceeds to hang on to the rope as the helicopter flies all over the desert canyons. The entire time Rusty is threatening the pilot and urging him to slam Thunder into one of the cliff walls they’re flying around.

His threats though would ultimately prove to be Rusty’s undoing. Not because of anything Thunder did, but because the pilot was pissed he was forced to participate in Rusty’s illegal conduct and reported him to the sheriff.

With Rusty locked up, all’s well that end’s well, right? Right! Except for the bad news Thunder receives at the hospital! Out comes the war paint and headband and the next thing we know Thunder is breaking into the local gun shop and going to war on his hometown! Again! Least favorite resident ever!

Mark Gregory does an even better job as Thunder this time around! It wasn’t anything he did – he was his usual gorgeously big lipped and big haired plywood self. But they butched up the dubbing job this time around, giving Mark a voice that allowed you to close your eyes and imagine that someone manly was playing Thunder.

Bo Svenson returns again as the clueless sheriff who while clearly is all sorts of negligent in managing his department, isn’t really a bad guy. The same guy is also playing the evil deputy who harassed Thunder the first go around! Even the same locations are used as you will surely recognize the Safeway store in the background from the original!

Giving Thunder a job (despite it being the least believable job in the universe for him) really elevated this movie past its perfect predecessor. Besides his personal war with Rusty and his time in prison, we also get to watch Thunder on patrol where he captures some bank robbers and in a completely random scene, busts a trespassing transvestite who beats Thunder up pretty good! It’s Mark Gregory though so when he walks funny back to his patrol car you can’t tell if it’s because he’s hurt of if he just still doesn’t know how to walk convincingly. It’s okay though because he’ll have a chance to keep working on his gait when the trilogy comes to a thunderous conclusion in Thunder III!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Thus, we must look to situations like George Seifert winning the Super Bowl in his first year as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers or even more dramatically, Steve Fisher winning the NCAA basketball tournament with the Michigan Wolverines after becoming head coach right before the tournament started to fully comprehend the sheer glory Fabrizio brought himself with Thunder.

No guy can do it alone though and just like Seifert had Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, and Roger Craig powering his drive to the Super Bowl and Fisher had Glen Rice carrying the load for him through March Madness, Fabrizio surrounded himself with an all-star crew of Italian icons.

Bo Svenson (The Inglorious Bastards) as the sheriff gives American audiences someone they might vaguely recognize from his Walking Tall roles. Antonio Sabato (Seven Blood-Stanined Orchids, Bye Bye Vietnam) lends his pumped up physique to things as an anti-Indian construction worker and even the star of Demons III: The Ogre, Paolo Malco, appears as a reporter hot on the trail of the biggest story of his obviously lackluster career!

But they’re all just so many tassels on the gorgeous jugs of a movie built like a freaking brick shithouse! Because this movie’s tall, tan, muscular body complete with long flowing hair belongs to the most beautiful man in Italian cinema!

A man who understands that pouty lips to positively die for is all the acting you really need to do when you’re destroying everything you can aim a bazooka at! A man called Trash! A man called War Bus Commando! A man called Mark Gregory!

Gregory is of course famous for his roles in Bronx Warriors, War Bus Commando and Ten Zan among others as well as his total inability to convincingly play anything remotely resembling a masculine character despite being usually cast as the most macho bad ass in the universe!

Any doubt as to this fact will quickly be dispelled when you listen to the interview Fred “The Hammer” Williamson gives on the Bronx Warriors DVD about Gregory and how he had to be taught how to walk in a manly fashion, but never could get it right!

Still, Gregory’s androgynous model look is perfect for the Navajo warrior named Thunder who comes back to his hometown only to find out that the local Indian cemetery is being desecrated by some construction.

Thunder is clearly a throwback to an earlier time and culture when it was perhaps acceptable for tough guys to look pretty. And his technique of staring expressionless at whatever is transpiring work to keep us focused on his bee-stung lips and the pain they no doubt are feeling by the racism his people are experiencing at the hands of the narrow-minded townspeople.

Fabrizio smartly doesn’t get in the way of all his superstars and lets them loose to do their thing, unhampered by stuff like dialogue, plot, character development, and only gives us the most cursory explanation of who Thunder is!

Fabrizio demonstrates a remarkable acumen for what we need in an action movie by reaching all the way back to the “Indian in a Modern World vs. Racist White Man” plot of 1973′s Billy Jack, retaining the great parts of it (Billy Jack kicking ass) and ditching the sucky parts (everything else) and adding construction equipment!

After Thunder gets hassled by the cops, run out of town, and then hassled and lassoed by the construction workers, he returns to town to get hassled by the cops again and like all loner killing machines who try really hard not to snap, he snaps!

He crashes through a store front window, steals a bow and some arrows and then it’s pretty much Little Big Horn all over again. But with a massive front end loader and Thunder’s trusty bazooka!

Thunder spends most of the movie running around the Arizona desert killing cops, construction workers, and even rescuing his girlfriend! The Sheriff spends a lot of his time on the CB calling in reinforcements and generally directing the effort to hunt Thunder down from his desert command post when he’s not watching college football on the TV he had dragged out there!

If it doesn’t make any sense that the construction crew would have a cache of heavy weapons at their site, that’s easily forgiven when Thunder starts rolling through town in his stolen front end loader, blasting cop cars and the evil bank that was financing the construction project at his burial ground.

And if it doesn’t make any sense that a guy on the run from the law and hiding out in the desert would start cruising through town on a big yellow machine, you can easily forgive that too when Thunder drives it through the police station and the bank!

Even Sabato gets into the act, blowing up Thunder’s girlfriend’s gas station!

Thankfully, much of the action is in gratuitous slow motion (including Thunder being punched in the face repeatedly!) so you can savor it! And if you’re disappointed when all the delightfully meaningless Mark Gregory-inspired destruction is finally over, even that can be easily forgiven since Thunder II and Thunder III follow!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

But once upon a time, Trash apparently really was thought of as something of an asset to a movie and Just Damned Soldier proves it. It’s one of those cheap action movies no one has ever heard of, but the opening credits list both Mark Gregory and co-star Peter Hooten before the title like they were the mid 1980s mercenary movie equivalent of Brad Pitt and George Clooney!

To give you an idea of just the sort of universe you stumbled into when rooting around movies like Just A Damned Soldier, most Mark Gregory fans would not be surprised he was listed before the title (we’re pretty sure that if he didn’t retire to raise wild horses in the hills of his native Italy or whatever that his future movies all would’ve have been variations of Mark Gregory Is Thunder! and Mark Gregory’s Jungle Tank Commando) it’s that that loser Peter Hooten was listed before him!

Don’t get me wrong, Peter Hooten is a legitimate Italian legend in his own right. He’s appeared in The Inglorious Bastards, Umberto Lenzi’s Wartime, and 2020 Texas Gladiators. He even ended his career on a high note, appearing in Claudio Fragasso’s deliciously bad Night Killer!

But come on, it’s not like there’s anybody out there talking about his sturdy, but not terribly memorable performances in those movies. You could probably stick the guy from Warbus, the guy from Cobra Mission, or David Warbeck in his place and no one would notice.

And if truth be told, Hooten is really probably best barely remembered from his turn as Dr. Strange in the totally forgotten 1978 TV movie of the same name!

The other thing you’ll quickly realize about how big an attraction Mark Gregory was believed to be was that he was so prominently featured in the credits for what basically amounted to a part that was just a glorified extra!

He barely had any lines, seemed to be about the third or fourth option on the four man strike team, and was hardly on screen at all! But the thing with stars is that they can take any bit part and totally take over the movie! Every moment that Mark has in this movie, he makes the most of!

During the scene where he and his pals are interrogating the bad guy’s girlfriend, it’s Mark that gets her to talk by sticking a knife right inside her mouth and making like he was going to slice her from stem to stern! And when Mark gets himself shot in the knee, his buddy asks if he can make it and Mark responds, “I’ll manage. Thanks.” He even remembers to limp in the next scene before apparently healing completely for the rest of the movie!

Mark’s involvement with his mercenary pals is the usual story. Hooten gets his old buddies together to steal a bunch of unrefined gold from the bad guy (Teitelbaum) and sells it to Afghan rebels because the Soviets killed his girlfriend during the invasion.

He and Teitelbaum go way back since they both served in Vietnam together, but after the war ended they went in opposite directions and Hooten holds a grudge against Teitelbaum because he turned in Hooten’s dad for being some sort of Nazi.

Teitelbaum goes after Hooten and his crew with the approval of the military leaders in Cambodia and the rest of the movie details the two attacking one another’s crew with varying degrees of success. (Hooten and his guys kill about 10,000 of Teitelbaum’s guys while Teitelbaum manages to dispatch one of Hooten’s guys with a bunch of darts. He does get style points though for sticking the body in a strip club toilet with a toilet paper sash placed on the corpse with the message “we want the gold” written on it.)

Ferdinando Baldi (Ten Zan, Treasure Of The Four Crowns) must have known this would be his final film when he wrote and directed it because other than that fleeting bit of back story related by some secondary characters to each other, he doesn’t waste any more time on stuff that doesn’t involve automatic gunfire, explosions or confrontations at such diverse locations as a carnival and fashion show.

The movie opens with the theft of the gold and Mark detonates a bunch of plastic explosives that look like Play-doh, causing all sorts of damage to Teitelbaum’s refinery. A chase through the jungle ensues and the movie never lets up with the wanton and mindless killing we demand in our completely disposable obscure foreign action movies. It’s really pretty much just assault weapon porn. Which is of course the best porn!

Baldi literally ends his career with a bang as the movie concludes with one of the guys blowing up an ammo dump for no reason, an explosion which is then replayed and frozen on screen for the closing credits!

This is also the guy who grabs a flamethrower after all the bad guys are disposed of and starts lighting up all the huts in Teitelbaum’s compound! Totally unnecessary of course, but highly appreciated by us action fans who like to see stuff burn!

For his part, Mark Gregory (who, like Peter Hooten, is appearing in his second to last film) reminds all of us why he’s the real star when he utters the movie’s final line following the destruction of the ammo dump, saying “Nice shooting, Cisco!” It’s the total Mark Gregory Experience in microcosm: he doesn’t say much and when he does, it’s usually about three words and frankly, quite pointless! Easily my tenth favorite of Mark Gregory’s ten films!

© 2008 MonsterHunter

Well, the greatest role after his role as Trash in Bronx Warriors, his role as Johnny Hondo in War Bus Commando, and his role as Thunder in all three Thunder films! Still, playing Adam looks damn good on his resume, too.

It certainly plays to his strength of standing around with a stupefied look on his face. After all, everything is new to Adam, so when he acts like a confused five year old when Eve announces she’s making a baby, it’s completely believable!

Enzo Doria and Luigi Russo do Italian film fans a great service with Blue Paradise. So much of our lives are devoted to watching every spaghetti western with Django in the title, every film starring Christopher Connelly, and every TV movie that Lamberto Bava somehow got financed that very little time is left for religion.

Blue Paradise is the way that us trash film aficionados can get a little dose of the Good Book. As a straight edge strong Christian that doesn’t mind knocking back a few brews and smoking a few blunts with my neighbor’s wife, it’s quite reassuring that I’m getting some credit from the big man upstairs while watching Blue Paradise.

It’s also really good since movies like King of Kings and The Robe don’t really cover this Adam and Eve business. I mean, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t some chimp’s grandson or whatever like those secular humanists, liberals, and women’s rights groups are always trying to say. It’s just nice to finally have some confirmation from a credible source. I daresay that if Blue Paradise had been screened at the Scopes Monkey Trial, this country wouldn’t be smack dab in the middle of the turd sandwich it finds itself in today!

As soon as Adam gets created, he spends a lot of time wandering around checking out his environment. He hangs out with some animals, discovers water, and maintains extraordinary conditioning of his God-like heavy metal perm. This was paradise you know.

But Adam gets bored and lonely, so he creates the world’s first sex doll! Technology not being terribly advanced six or seven days after Earth started up, his sex doll is actually just a sand sculpture. Incredibly, despite only having himself as a model, Adam sculpts a super hottie!

This was still a time of miracles, so a magical rain came and washed all the sand off of the sculpture, revealing a very blonde Eve! Like all relationships, things were pretty sweet first. But also like all relationships, Eve starts whining about how bored she is and the next thing you know she’s eating this apple that this snake kept telling her to eat, even though Adam repeatedly told her not to. This is obviously the part of the Bible not even Democrats and other satanists could deny. At this point, I thought I was watching a documentary on every relationship I ever had!

It goes without saying that God is super pissed over this whole apple business. And his wrath is fearsome indeed! Adam and Eve get evicted via the worst special effects in the history of all existence!

God pulls out all the stops, letting loose from heaven the Three Plagues of Cheap Optical Effects: grainy stock footage, grade-school level stop motion animation, and blue screen work composited by a Lucifer himself! We’re talking Old Testament level vengeance! Times a hundred!

Adam and Eve survive their brush with low budget filmmaking and travel across the newly inhospitable landscape. Along the way, they run into a variety of obstacles to happiness.

There’s the pterodactyl they fight. Then you’ve got the mega-ugly ape men who take them prisoner while Adam and Eve squabble about their relationship. It was a pretty intense argument and Adam only stops arguing when the cavemen accidentally bump his head on a rock while hauling them back to their village.

Eventually they escape and decide they “need some space” and break up! Eve climbs a tree and refuses to keep journeying with Adam, while Adam says screw it and just moseys on without her!

Eve falls in with a tribe of guys painted green and hooks up with one of their hunky warriors. Adam continues his trek, seeking the sea since that’s where life began and he’s convinced for absolutely no reason that that is where they need to return to.

Eve’s new boyfriend and his tribe end up fighting some way ugly hairy humanoids and Adam magically appears during the battle to pitch in. Lots of guys getting bashed with rocks and stuck with big sticks illustrate the Bible passages on not messing with guys who are kick ass.

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I tell you that Eve and Adam start dating again and continue to search for the sea. One really short Ice Age later, and these two are having a baby in the sea and living happily ever after.

Blue Paradise is certainly a weird concoction, even for an industry that served up stuff like American Rickshaw, Yor, and Shocking Dark. Much of the time it feels like it wants to be one of those Italian Conan rip-offs like Conquest or Conqueror Of The World, except that the level of violence and gore isn’t really there.

But it is also rooted in its Adam and Eve Bible story, except that Adam and Eve are portrayed as being the stereotypical bickering couple. Adam stands around a lot staring and saying things that lead you to believe that he is an odd mix of arrogant a-hole and retard, while Eve is a whiny shrew.

And of course, as if guided by a divinely inspired hand, it all works! For all of us! Christians will love its simple-minded view of creation! Non-Christians will love it for its car wreck like execution! And fans of Mark Gregory will experience the Rapture right in their pants!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Genial special forces operative and all around killing machine Johnny Hondo has only been back home at his Montana ranch for a month following a daytime rescue mission (during which he was inexplicably dressed in black) in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan when his country comes calling again!

General Ross tells Johnny that his father, General Hondo, is dying in Washington! A deathbed conversation is quickly arranged for the Hondos and the General sends his son on one final explosive suicide mission!

General Hondo makes it clear that there is no chance for Johnny to succeed, but that he needs to do it to restore his old man’s military honor!

A lot of you civilians out there probably are judging General Hondo pretty harshly, putting his boy in a tight spot by asking him to take on a “no chance in hell” mission into enemy territory just so that the General will be remembered as an honorable soldier.

You need to understand though that guys like me and Johnny Hondo live by our own code of honor. When our country trains and brainwashes our conscience out of us so that we can hit the international flashpoints and protect our nation and Big Oil’s national security interests by any means necessary, we aren’t just soulless automatons intent on destabilizing unfriendly governments.

You see, despite some of the unpleasant things that freedom and democracy sometimes demand us to do, we are also bound by two immutable rules of soldiering: never leave a man behind and if a man is left behind, you will undertake a secret mission to rescue him, no matter how suicidal that secret mission is. In Johnny Hondo’s case you just need to substitute “man” with “school bus.”

As in the case with most secret rescue missions, a lot of information is on a need to know basis. Usually, the only thing a guy like Johnny Hondo needs to know is that it’s a suicide mission, but that its success is vital to all America holds dear. What he doesn’t need to know is all the doublecrossing his superior officer is planning.

So it is then that Johnny Hondo parachutes back into Afghanistan not knowing that the top secret material in the school bus his dad drove from Iran is a couple of bricks of the Shah's gold. That Johnny never stopped to question how it is that no one supposedly knew what the top secret material was even though his dad loaded it onto the school bus just demonstrates what a good soldier he is. That scripter Dardano Sacchetti expects us to believe that a general could drive a school bus from Iran to Afghanistan without arousing suspicion just means that the Middle East must have some really big ass school districts.

Once in Afghanistan, Johnny acquires a native boy sidekick and his sister, locates the school bus, also locates a couple of soldiers being held captive who were with his father on the school bus mission, and sets about wiping out the entire Russian military in the process.

What could have been a very boring movie with its lack of plot and ugly locations (Johnny just wanders around various rock-strewn landscapes) is actually a very boring movie with lots of explosions and guys getting shot!

It also helps that Johnny decides to undertake his secret mission wearing a white turtleneck and a fancy tan coat. So often, these one man armies forget that looking good is just as important as the body count you accumulate during your mission. But should we have expected anything less from femininely-handsome Mark Gregory (Bronx Warriors, Delta Force Commando) in his final screen appearance?

He's not the only welcome familiar face though! There's also Bobby Rhodes as the curse-prone POW mechanic who spearheads the repair of the school bus! Bobby played the pimp in Demons and the gym instructor in Demons 2 and is able to get the school bus running after Johnny and his little sidekick manage to locate a new battery, distributor, spark plugs, tires, and gasoline in a nearby town!

It’s a testament to Johnny’s special forces training that he was not only able to find a village in the middle of Soviet-controlled Afghanistan that had all these parts, but that he was able to haul it all back to the school bus on foot without anyone noticing!

But someone did notice! The evil Russian commander that Johnny battled in the opening rescue mission somehow recognizes Johnny’s model good looks! That’s the kind of crafty business that made the Cold War so hard fought. That this Russian was able to notice Johnny Hondo even though he was the only clean shaven guy in a white turtle neck scavenging car parts in a small Afghanistan village really goes to show just how close we were to losing the Cold War!

Luckily, this Commie had problems getting a helicopter which allowed Johnny and friends to engage in a “fixing up and armoring the school bus” montage before the Russians could start trying to blow them up as Johnny made his mad dash across the sixty miles of hell on Earth that stood between him and the sweet freedom of the Pakistani border!

Finally, it’s the moment we’ve been waiting for ever since we first heard that Johnny Hondo was headed back to Afghanistan to rescue a school bus: Johnny Hondo becomes War Bus Commando! What this means is that he sticks his gun out of the little port hole in the metal shielding of the bus and takes pot shots at the Russians. He also ends up driving the War Bus.

After gunning down the helicopter the evil Russian commander finally managed to get his hands on and getting doublecrossed by one of the POWs he rescued, Johnny, his native sidekick, and Bobby Rhodes all get rescued by General Ross in a jeep!

General Ross is mildly upset that his gold got blown up, while Johnny’s not pissed at all that General Ross tricked him into all this just so he could get his hands on some gold. In fact, Johnny has a good laugh as his native sidekick points out that his pet horse has survived the secret mission and is now running after the jeep to freedom as well! Dang, but that was a fun secret mission!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

I suppose I should explain.  When you’re Delta Force Commando and have retired from the Delta Force for a military desk job, you’re always going to be yearning for some good old-fashioned black ops/plausible deniability mission that sees you slitting throats, blowing up choppers, and generally destabilizing unfriendly Third World governments.

I know making sure the Puerto Rican base you’re stationed at maintains its inventory of staplers and paper clips is also an important part of American national security, but the rush you get from counting boxes of copy toner isn’t quite the same as diving out of exploding jeeps.

A relationship involves making trade-offs and compromises. By getting killed, Mrs. Delta Force Commando gives her husband a reason to live.  He in turn vows to get the dirty bastards who ruined his boring, peaceful domestic bliss no matter the cost.

It’s really a win-win situation for everyone.  And by everyone, I of course mean the viewer sitting at home, anxious to see unholy vengeance meted out through the use of more knives, bombs, ammo, and rockets than were used in both world wars combined.

But that’s not all!  You also get two commandos for the price of one!  Not only are we blessed with the beefy, dim-witted appeal of Bret Baxter Clark from Cobra Mission 2 as Delta Force Commando, but you get low budget Italian superstar  and former National Football League standout Fred “The Hammer” Williamson (2019: After The Fall Of New York, Bronx Warriors) as his reluctant and sassy partner, ace pilot Captain Beck!

The set up for this one is inane to the point of being irrelevant.  Terrorists hit Delta Force Commando’s base and steal an atomic bomb conveniently kept in a metal backpack with a large radiation symbol stenciled on it.

Putting aside the reality of whether Puerto Rican military bases actually have A-Bombs laying around to steal, what makes even less sense is one of the terrorists decides to shoot up Delta Force Commando’s apartment for no reason other than he happened to see DFC in the hallway. Admittedly, he and his goons were running off with the bomb, but again, what A-Bomb is going to be stored down the hall from DFC’s apartment?

After spending all of two seconds holding his dead wife, DFC hits the streets looking for payback!  First he carjacks Captain Beck’s Mercedes to go after the bad guys and after getting that blown up, he hits the local watering hole where his former Delta Force commander (expertly played by Bo Svenson of The Inglorious Bastards) informs him that the terrorists are believed to be somewhere near Nicaragua.

After getting to Nicaragua and surviving a dogfight which saw Hammer shoot down another fighter (I’m not entirely sure that it wasn’t one of ours!), they run out of gas, eject and then the jet blows up!  Because jets blow up when they run out of fuel!

But who cares if they really do or not!  DFC sure doesn’t since he’s on the ground and still has his duffel bag full of weapons he stole from the base armory right before hijacking Hammer’s jet.  (If they started court martialling Delta Force Commando right after the movie ended for everything he did, they still wouldn’t be done!)

DFC’s plan consists of running around whatever town he ended up in until he runs into enemy soldiers to kill.  Guys are getting shoot, knives are chucked into them, and best of all, getting hit with the silver ball bearings that DFC is firing from his Delta Force Issue Slingshot!  I couldn’t wait to see what he was going to do with his Delta Force Issue Mini-Crossbow!

Just like I wasn’t let down with the pregnant wife angle of the film, the mini-crossbow exceeds our wildest expectations!  After stealing a city bus, DFC uses it in a firefight with a helicopter and somehow ends up commandeering the copter for himself!

Eventually, DFC and Hammer find the terrorists hanging out near a dam and have a big battle there.  Naturally, this results in their helicopter getting blown up right after they bail out. Incredibly, this would not be the last helicopter they would be involved with blowing up.

DFC finally engages the head terrorist in hand to hand combat which ends the only way it could – with DFC pulling the pin on a couple of grenades, dumping them in this guy’s pockets and kicking him out of a second story window!

Oh, and the guy playing the terrorist?  It’s just Mark Gregory, better known and beloved as Trash from Bronx Warriors and Bronx Warriors 2!

Delta Force Commando would be a classic if it was just this random mix of actors and carnage I’ve already described, but this is a film that also gives us those little touches that earn it a spot on anyone’s ten best Italian commando movie list.

Dardano Sacchetti’s script is not only littered with a mega-dose of cussing, but also bits of dialogue you’ll be rewinding to listen to again and again.  Whether it’s Bo Svenson declaring that “I’m not in the thinking business, I’m in the military business” or when he tells some evil bureaucrat that the only reason he’s still alive is because Bo only has three weeks until he retires or when Hammer complains about one DFC’s grenades making him sick and DFC retorting that it’s a “puke-grenade”, you’ll be sharing these action witticisms with your friends and family for weeks to come.

At the end of the film when the bomb is ready to detonate and they’re surrounded by enemy forces, DFC seems ready to accept to defeat when Hammer unleashes perhaps his best line of the film: “Hey, this beautiful brown body’s got a lot of living left to do, pal!” Not to be outdone, DFC counters with “excuse me while I throw up!”

What a relief it was then when the real Delta Force showed up to rescue them and the bomb turned out to be a fake one used on maneuvers!  What a whacky misunderstanding on everyone’s part!  Time for Hammer to head back to base, shake off the puke grenades and electrocuted nuts and get ready for Delta Force Commando II: Priority Red One!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

By the time of Enzo G. Castellari’s Bronx Warriors 2, a plan is afoot to raze the entire Bronx and build a gleaming new metropolis over top of it. In an effort to make this come to pass the president and vice president of the company in charge of the project aim to rid the area of its residents no matter the cost.

The public line is that generous financial incentives are being offered as well as relocating residents to lovely solar powered homes in New Mexico. The cruel reality is that guys in silver suits and motorcycle helmets are going around armed with flamethrowers and roasting every Bronxian they can find. I’ll bet that whole dang borough was smelling like a Kentucky Fried Chicken after awhile!

After a failed attempt to kill Trash, the bad guys decide that if they can’t get Trash, then they’ll get his parents. Well, I guess that’s a good plan, if you’re looking to give Trash all kinds of incentive to unify the remaining gang members in an all out rebellion that will leave the city a pile of smoldering ruins!

And just like we imagined, we meet Mr. and Mrs. Trash in the middle of an argument while Mr. Trash is sucking down a Budweiser.

A team of dirty, no good Disinfestors is standing outside the door listening in on their squabble though and once they’ve heard enough, they break in to get some flame throwing practice before going up against Trash himself.

Trash comes home and discovers his parents are dead. This elicits something along the lines of a saddened sneer and he ends up underground with the remaining gang members eating soup while everyone else is discussing kidnapping the president of the company doing all these mean things.

But it’s not like he’s so wrapped up in his own grief that he can’t offer a suggestion when someone wonders how they would get around above ground to snatch the president with all the security present. “Uh, dat would be hard, but you could do it under da ground, right?”

I’m paraphrasing Trash here, but we know a good idea for a low budget movie when we hear it! I feel about forty minutes of run down sewer scenes coming on!

The plot involves kidnapping the president so that the corporation will have to negotiate with the residents of the Bronx. If this doesn’t sound exactly like the sort of plan that Trash or the gang leader Dablone (Antonio Sabato, Sr. in pirate clothes) would come up with, you’re even smarter than Trash! It’s the idea of nosy reporter, Moon!

She’s a Bronx resident who is outraged at what is happening and is determined to make a difference. Later on, during the actual kidnapping, she would be determined to get her ass shot off as a diversion so that Trash and Strike could kidnap the president.

By now you’re wondering who the hell Strike is. Strike (Scorpion from The New Barbarians) would be the only man who can carry off the plan.

He’s the brains behind that big underground bank robbery job and the underground job that cleaned Tiffany’s out. He’s pretty much retired with his young son (Junior) to an underground lair and if you meet up with him, you better hope he’s in a good mood because if he isn’t then blah, blah, blah. We know he’s going to take the job, so why bother trying to establish his “psycho-rogue” credentials?

And does it make me a bad person that I laughed out loud when Junior first met Trash and called him a “fag?” Trash got a little payback later when he made a comment to Strike about whether Strike was going to help out or just sit there and “scratch your balls.” You just don’t get movies anymore that use such banal vulgarity as the primary form of communication. (Henry Silva’s first word in the movie is the f-word!)

Henry Silva? You better believe it! Taking over the spot of “embarrassed actor you’ve probably heard of picking up a paycheck in a movie they hope no one ever sees” from the late Vic Morrow, Henry plays the part of Wrangler, the expelled warden who is now in charge of the Disinfestors’ plot to kill Trash and then to rescue the president once he’s kidnapped, and then to kill the president once the vice president asks him to.

Truth be told, Henry doesn’t do much more than hang around the silver command post van of the Disinfestors looking alternately bored and pained by being anywhere near a movie directed by a guy named Enzo and starring Enzo’s brother as the president.

You get a lot of running around sewers and guys shooting at each other as well as stuff blowing up (Junior is a demolitions expert) and there’s even a scene where Strike slides down a rope with one hand while shooting Disinfestors with the gun in his other hand. And we all know that guys sliding and/or swinging on ropes is never bad.

The only knock against Bronx Warriors 2 would have to be that it just isn’t quite Bronx Warriors. While it easily outclasses most of its post-apocalyptic Italian brethren, it doesn’t have the crazy quilt of offbeat characters of the first one or the wide variety of weaponry used.

It also didn’t have much in the way of Trash. For some reason, he wasn’t doing much more than running around shooting his peashooter every now and again. He hardly had any dialogue (I think the ball scratching comment was the highlight) and Enzo seemed more than satisfied to treat this as an ensemble piece and play down actor Mark Gregory’s weaknesses (everything but his hair).

That suits the film just fine though because it all ends up smelling like extra sharp mid-eighties cheese however you slice it, so go on and take this Trash out. You know you want to.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The action in this movie stems from the fact that Ann is about to turn of age and inherit her interest in the Manhattan Corporation, the world’s largest arms dealer. She doesn’t want to be someone’s puppet in business matters, so she does what any smart business person would do in such a situation and flees to the no man’s land that is the Bronx.

Ann first encounters the gang known as the Zombies. The Zombies are a bunch of sissies who dress up in white roller hockey gear complete with skates and hockey sticks. I’m sure those skates are pretty good for rolling over all the rubble in this no man’s land.

They threaten her until the Riders show up. The Riders are your good guys (at least some of them are) because they turn out to be the most normal gang in the Bronx. They ride motorcycles and dress up like bikers usually do. Except for their leader Trash that is.

Trash (Mark Gregory, who was supposedly discovered in real life in a shoe store) is one of these tall, smooth-chested guys with pouty lips and lots of permed heavy metal hair. I kept squinting to see if he was actually the bassist for Ratt, but never could quite make the call one way or the other.

He accents his kick ass hair with a leather headband, leather vest (no shirt, but that’s stating the obvious) and tight blue jeans that appeared to come with the crotch bulge sewn right in.

He mostly talked like he was learning English as he went along and spent entirely too much time taking lip from his fellow gang members, particularly the traitorous Ice, but I won’t lie and say that I wasn’t excited to learn that Trash returned for Bronx Warriors 2!

Trash and the rest of Riders take Ann under their wing, but Ann’s dad isn’t about to let his little girl fly the coop so easily. He starts plotting to get her out of the Bronx and eventually comes up with his plan to use the one man capable of going up against everything the Bronx has to throw at a man: real-life Bronx native Vic Morrow as Hammer!

Hammer doesn’t care about anything so long as he can go into the Bronx and waste a bunch of dirtbags. He’s the kind of guy who, when one character whines that Hammer is just hoping that no one remembers he was from the Bronx, he snarls back something like, “no, I want to make sure they don’t forget it!”

Part of Hammer’s scheme to get Ann back and to satisfy his personal antipathy towards all the inhabitants of the Bronx is to start a big gang war. To this end, he recruits Ice, with the promise that with Trash out of the way he can assume his rightful role as leader of the Riders.

Ice gives him Trash’s spear because Hammer knows that Trash is going to Ogre (Fred Williamson) for help in locating Ann (she went and got herself captured by the Zombies after they were able to drop a cargo net on Trash). With the spear, Hammer figures he can make it look like Trash killed one of Ogre’s men, thus igniting an inferno of gang rage!

Getting to see Ogre isn’t as easy as just hopping on your hog and riding across town though. Trash will have cross the territories of several different gangs to get there. I think we all know what that means! Just as he did in his superlative 2019: After The Fall Of New York, director Enzo G. Castellari (also playing the Vice President in this movie) keeps things colorfully silly by having each gang dressed up in a different gimmick.

Hammer finally pulls his dirty trick on Trash and Ogre, but after some yelling and screaming, Ogre and Trash decide to work together to free Ann from the clutches of the Zombies.

After an apocalyptic battle with the Zombies, everyone goes back to Ogre’s place where Ogre brings out a New York City themed birthday cake for Ann. That’s when Hammer attacks will all his flame thrower-wielding policemen!

This is when Hammer really brings it home as he stands around cackling madly and using these hand movements straight out of the Handbook for Aspiring Megalomaniacs. Trash has the last laugh though when he shots Hammer in the chest with a grappling hook.

Well, he would have had the last laugh, if Ann hadn’t gone and gotten her ass shot off, but it’s like she reminds Trash during her extended death scene, “we…live…with…death” As trite as that is, Trash can’t complain since he gave her the same (though much longer and funnier) speech about death in the Bronx while they were experiencing a quiet moment on a beach somewhere.

Just like in his 2019: After The Fall Of New York, Enzo does it again. With little more to work with than a bad idea and incompetent cast, including Ann, who was played by his daughter, he manages to wring lots of low expectation entertainment from his stew of bad wardrobe, bad hair, bad dubbing, and bad dialogue. None of it gets in the way of copious amounts of action and swearing that keep the viewer fixated on the screen in moderate disbelief.

Obviously not as over the top as 2019: After The Fall Of New York since this was rooted closer to reality (trust me – that was hard to write), but those of you worried that the movie would just be some grimy biker flick with guys in rival gangs swinging chains at each other, can rest assured that there’s flame throwers, boot spikes, elbow spikes, hockey sticks, knives, guns, metal fingernails, a whip, and that grappling hook and they all get a good workout.

© 2011 MonsterHunter