Though Stormbringer sounds like the name of Odin’s sword, it was actually something far more deadly, powerful, and scary than some wimpy has-been God’s weapon of vengeance! It was an old Russian bomb with SIX warheads! That means you’re pretty much getting U.S Seals 6 for the price of U.S. Seals 3!

The guys from the first two U.S. Seals movies were pretty good. Okay, they were U.S. Seals, so they were the best! But I think we can all agree that we’re going to need better than the best to take down Stormbringer. Besides, as good as all those other U.S. Seals were, it’s not like we actually remember who they were, right?

Enter the next generation of U.S. Seals! Guys so next generation that most of them are played by inexpensive actors from Eastern Europe where the movie was shot! But don’t worry! The leader of the U.S. Seals is a pure red, white and blue dude name Tyler Christopher! And he’s not some porn star despite that name! Even better, he’s a soap opera stud who was married to Eva Longoria once upon a time! You can’t get much more American than that!

Tyler plays the Seal commander named Rick. Rick is the sort of Seal commander who goes on a mission to nab super-terrorist Casper (Robert Mitchum’s grandson Bentley!) at the beginning of the movie, only to have the entire mission blown sky high by a nervous team member.

Rick’s best friend Steve is also killed on the mission and now all Rick wants is revenge on the evil Casper.

As if being haunted by his best friend’s death isn’t bad enough (and Rick gets credit for being haunted enough to have flashbacks to a mission where Steve saved his life while lots of stuff blew up in the background), he’s also saddled with some problem team members for the next mission which involves Stormbringer.

He’s forced to bring along that damn Baker who screwed up the last mission. Baker is the son of a senator who is on the Armed Services Committee so despite Rick knowing it’s B.S., he has to go along because of politics!

Rick’s day though is about to get even worse because then he’s ordered to take along a captured terrorist to assist in the hunt for Strombringer! A terrorist that was captured during the mission where Rick’s best friend was killed! It goes without saying that this is pretty much a suicide mission, but Rick’s commanding officer goes ahead and says it anyway!

U.S. Seals:Dead Or Alive sets all the special forces movie plot points up with military precision. Can Rick avoid jeopardizing the mission by trying to get revenge on Casper for Steve’s death? Will Rick get revenge on Casper for Steve’s death anyway? Will Baker keep messing up and endangering the team? Will Baker perform some heroic act and give his life for the mission? Can the team truly trust the terrorist that is now part of U.S. Seals? How fast will the totally obvious doublecross occur once the team gets into Albania? And most importantly for the viewer watching at home, how much surplus military equipment and containers marked “petrol” will be exploding?

Fans of straight-to-DVD commando team movies will be pleased to know that as soon as U.S. Seals hit the dingy streets of Albania (for some reason the Albanian army is involved with the Russian army and Stormbringer) everything goes according to plan.

Baker panics at a checkpoint and blows the team’s cover forcing them to flee in a hail of gunfire and tank explosions. The terrorist on the team pulls the double cross we’ve been waiting for. And Rick manages to make a dumb decision because he wants to get Casper. Clearly, when Rick’s CO advised it was nearly a suicide mission, he had worked with Rick before.

Some of the more pedantic types out there have criticized this film because of the creative license it takes with some of the details. I’ve seen people complain about the wrong ranks being used for naval personnel and I’m sure a lot of folks would say the real Navy Seals probably wouldn’t take a terrorist with them on a secret mission behind enemy lines.

And a case could be made that a rubber boat (which the US Seals just happened to find loaded with hand grenades) might not be able to sink a freighter the size of the Empire State Building in 6 seconds, but the important thing to remember is that we got to see the US Seals blow up a big ass freighter with just a dinky rubber boat!

You’ve also got an enemy compound blown up with so much explosive I can still smell the cordite! And not one, but two army troop carriers are wrecked, one going over a cliff in a quarry and another plunging into the water off a dock! Casper even has a sneering, ugly blonde Eurotrash girlfriend who is an expert in martial arts!

Sure, some details probably weren’t totally true to life (like Albania having an army), but if you value your country’s national security, you not only don’t mind these inaccuracies, you want them! In short, if you hate U.S. Seals: Dead Or Alive, you don’t support the troops and you hate our great country and are no better than Casper!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The first U.S. Seals was a stodgily conventional special ops melodrama that failed to bring anything new or patriotic to the elite military unit genre with its routine revenge story and its less-than-jacked middle-aged villain.

Add in all the by-now over-familiar reliance on cheap eastern European locations, extras, and military equipment, and you can forgive a grunt like me who’s done a ton of tours with flicks like this over the years from nodding off during the silly fist fight that concluded that movie. Still, there were two more U.S. Seals films after that, so someone must have seen something in the series, right?

Enter director Isaac Florentine. Florentine has demonstrated an ability to squeeze as much ass kick out of as little as humanly possible in such films as the great Desert Kickboxer, Savate with Olivier Gruner, and Nu Image’s jingositically entertaining special forces effort called Special Forces.

He ditches all the crappy stuff from U.S. Seals (everything except the title and the Old Man giving the orders) and adds everything we love in movies about guys who never want to leave a man behind, but always end up getting every man killed except the sexy girlfriend.

Remember the off-putting puffy Euro poof who ran the pirating operation we were supposed to worry about in U.S. Seals? Circus seals could’ve handled that over-stuffed blowhard! This time around, the U.S. Seals have to go up against one of their own!

This time it’s personal! And everything our hero Casey knows, the evil Ratliff knows, too! What can possibly tip the balance in Casey’s favor? How about the samurai-sword wielding, kung fu expert sister of the gal that Ratliff raped and killed?

Raped and killed a woman? That’s definitely pretty freaking villainous, but U.S. Seals
II isn’t in this half way! This girl was the daughter of Casey and Ratliff’s sensai! And their sensai commits hari-kari after he finds out his daughter is dead!

That’s the sort of evil karma that could probably serve as the basis for six or seven normal kickboxing revenge movies, but U.S. Seals 2 is out to prove that there’s a reason the team’s motto is, “no regrets. Just kick some ass!” as one dying character so eloquently put it!

You see, Ratliff isn’t just some raping and murdering dirtbag! He’s also gone and set up a secret base on an abandoned Soviet compound on some island and is demanding a billion dollars from the United States government or he is going to launch a stealth Soviet missile and nuke a whole bunch of stuff we don’t want nuked!

So what? We just send in the Seals to take him down hard, right? Except for one thing! The reason the Soviets abandoned the island compound was a big chemical fire! Freaking methane everywhere! One spark will the blown the entire island sky high! And we need to rescue a scientist held hostage!

The Seals are going to have go in without any guns to search and destroy this creep straight into hell! So they’re going to need not just any old Seal team like all the gun-toting dudes from the first movie! They’re going to need the most motley crew of screw ups, jack offs, and assholes ever assembled from Seal spare parts! It’s going to take a half dirty dozen of them or so!

It almost seems like Florentine is showing off after setting up the concept that these U.S. Seals are going to be a band of hastily-assembled misfits who have to fight with chains, knives, and expertly choreographed kung fu when he has Marshall Teague from Special Forces and the Old Man go out and find Casey at his civilian welding job to try and coax him back to lead the Seals on the most revenge and methane-filled mission of all time!

It turns out that after everything that went down with Ratliff, Casey quit the Seals and had a falling out with the surviving sister who he really cared about! So he retired for a life of peace where he could forget the past! By welding!

Casey signs on as soon as hears that his old nemesis Ratliff is the object of the mission and sets off to assemble his team. One guy is still in the military, one is a religious freak working on a prison chain gang, one is a biker who doesn’t shave, and another is a killer for hire who hangs out at strip bars. And finally, the twin sister of the dead girl!

Marshall Teague also goes along with his special air gun that shoots acid pellets, but only has a range of 25 yards! And this movie is such a brawling bad boy that even when he’s within 25 yards, Marshall sometimes just uses the gun to whack people in the head!

The movie doesn’t skimp or let you down with its hand to hand action, sending an endless supply of Ratliff’s henchman against the Seals! Guys are flipping, spinning around, flying through the air, falling off rubble, getting sliced by swords and whacked by chains! One of Casey’s handpicked guys even turns traitor and Casey has to stick a skinny blade right through the guy’s forehead even as the guy is stabbing Casey with his own blade!

By the time the sprinkler system has gone off during the final confrontation between Casey and Ratliff that sees them running up walls and somersaulting through the air, I thought I had reached action nirvana! But then Casey went and was trying to run his sword straight up Ratliff’s crotch and wasn’t getting anywhere until the kung fu sister came and grabbed the other side of the sword and both she and Casey split that bastard in half! I screamed out loud in ecstasy! And there was still an escape in a mini sub and island to blow up! Turns out that the Seals’ motto was exactly right! No regrets! Just kick some ass!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

If not the most epic of all of the simpering piss-colored robe wearing punch putz films, Karate Warrior 5 is definitely the fattest! Karate Warrior’s fat friend Tubby finds himself the center of the action and intrigue and acquits himself quite well in his post diet-pill salesman phase which began with him selling friend chicken during the big match that concluded Karate Warrior 4.

Completely embracing the lardly lifestyle he and his large lady friend have been somewhat in denial about, both of them begin to attend meetings of the Extra Large Club of America.

The ELCA is very exclusive as we find out right from the beginning when Tubby’s friends are refused entry because they just aren’t fat enough! But this isn’t just any old club devoted to pigs complaining about physically fit folks without self-esteem issues. This club has got members only sweat suits!

And what sweat suits they are! Second only to porn machine Ron Jeremey’s surprise appearance in the previous installment, the sweat suits have to be the series highpoint. A blinding salmon color (so much the better for the fatties to flaunt it all in front of skinny twerps!), these loose fitting garments are emblazoned with the ELCA’s logo – a crossed knife and fork!

As awesome as these sweat suits were though (and they must have been since Tubby and his girlfriend insisted on wearing these grody things most of the film), they would also prove to get Tubby in some of the biggest trouble of his life!

Some of the evil kids from the last movie team up with a bunch of car stealing freaks that run a junkyard and once they put their heads together, they decide to kidnap Karate Warrior’s rich girlfriend. And also decide that their giant black kung fu buddy will brawl with Karate Warrior at the end of the movie!

Of course none of it made any more sense then the camper Karate Warrior’s girlfriend was being held having indoor plumbing installed as if the interior scenes were shot somewhere other than where the exterior shots of the rusted out camper were done. Or as much sense as Karate Warrior’s sister breaking the case wide open by recognizing a pick up truck and climbing in the back of it and hiding until she could escape into the junkyard to help her friend.

In a set up that may well have been ingenious, but since this film like Karate Warrior 3 and Karate Warrior 4 had no English option, may have also been hideously stupid, one of the kidnappers wears an ski mask and an ELCA sweat suit!

Another kidnapper somehow tricks Tubby into buying a pizza which somehow causes the police to believe that Tubby is the kidnapper! Even worse for Tubby, the police throw his pizza on the ground when they discover none of the ransom is inside of it! Could this day get any worse?

Nah. Director Fabrizio De Angelis remembers all of a sudden that this is a Karate Warrior movie so he unleashes the titular tae kwon dope and he busts out his girlfriend and then heads off to the fight of his life against Alabama Bull!

It’s a classic Karate Warrior match lasting only a few brain numbing minutes replete with pointless slow motion which only serves to display the poorly staged fighting as well as all of Karate Warriors anguished expressions whenever he’s being savagely beaten until using his secret move to end the match.

Obviously, Karate Warrior 5 is a bit a breather between the Ron Jeremy-endorsed Karate Warrior 4 and Karate Warrior 6 where Tubby and crew go overseas and get involved with a mermaid. Still, it is essential viewing mainly because Karate Warrior makes a passing reference to it in the next film.

Short on Karate Warrior and long on Tubby and his barf colored fat suit, Karate Warrior 5 would under any other circumstances be called a failure on a cosmic scale, but in the Karate Warrior universe, it merely feels like its treading water until the gang heads to Greece for the internationally spectacular conclusion to one of the only film series with five sequels no one has ever heard of!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

But then again, the themes, particularly in Karate Warrior 4, are universal! In any language, revenge is pure awesome and even though I didn’t get to experience all the nasty things the evil Japanese kung fu punk said to Karate Warrior or his sister, or understand exactly why he pretended to like Karate Warrior’s sister, but then somehow humiliated her in front of his friends, I couldn’t wait to see his neck snapped or back broken in the inevitable brawl that would surely conclude the film!

And you don’t need to speak any European-style jibber jabber to know all about hating your dad! Heck, if my dad was Italian film legend David Warbeck and he spent most of the movie in a bathrobe malingering in a Veterans’ Administration hospital, I’d be a little pissed off at him, too!

Really though, the most important theme for the young people watching at home has to be learning about the danger of diet pills! In a move that will surprise no one who saw all the crazy crap the fat friend of Karate Warrior engaged in during Karate Warrior 6, Porky is now milling around the school and nightspots hawking bottles of diet pills!

But what seems like a harmless after school job to earn money to buy more Ring Dings and Moon Pies, turns almost deadly, but certainly hilarious when Karate Warrior himself is slipped an overdose of them in his drink right before the big kick fight against the Japanese dude!

As every schoolchild who slept through health class in fifth grade knows though, the only way to counteract a substantial quantity of grey market wonder drug is a steaming cup of Karate Warrior’s sensei’s patented Tae Kwon Do Cure All Miracle Tonic & Roundhouse Kick Liniment!

Once Karate Warrior chokes it down, there’s no doubt he’ll be ready to be beaten within an inch of life during the final fight until the last minute when sensei will perform his patented Far Eastern Head Rub and Relaxing Scalp Massage which will unlock the fearsome karate powers within Karate Warrior that gloriously put his last opponent in a wheelchair!

Wheelchair? Crippled another man in the ring? How in the hell can Karate Warrior ever fight again? Wouldn’t any sensibly haunted hero turn his back on the way of life that caused him to permanently maim another (but no doubt deserving) warrior?

Give Karate Warrior some credit! He did quit the fighting biz! He even destroyed the glass case someone erected in front of his college which celebrated his vicious win with pictures of the loser in a wheelchair! But then they had to go and beat poor old sensei’s ass when they were trying to rob his restaurant!

We all know what that means! An initial confrontation with the offending gang where Karate Warrior sprays them with a fire extinguisher followed up by some pretty lame training montages.

Maybe Karate Warrior was just planning on relying on his head massage during the match, but running a couple of steps on a pier, trying to balance on a railing and shadow boxing with the 150 year old sensei is not how I imagine world class kick studs prepare for the most important battle of their freaking life since the last most important battle at the conclusion of their previous film!

True Karate Warrior fans know though that you don’t watch one of his films to see him half assing his training or even to see his short, unconvincing outbreaks of martial arts mayhem.

All that is merely the window dressing for director Fabrizio De Angelis to toss off the bizarre moments that make these films the memorably abominable rapid fire series of punches to your movie-watching solar plexus you perversely crave!

So it is that you’ll be chortling when Porky gets beaten unconscious while taking a piss at a urinal. And you can’t help but giggle when it’s time for the final showdown and it takes place in a cramped room at the local karate school which is located on the second floor of a scuzzy-looking strip mall!

The greatest moment of the film (and perhaps of De Angelis’ entire directing career) takes place at the beginning of the big dirt bike race in a junkyard between Karate Warrior and the bad guy when we see the chubby dude holding up the trophy and announcing the start of the race is none other than porn legend Ron Jeremy!

When the Hedgehog takes a breather from boning chicks to appear in your film, there’s really not much left to say, is there? You almost have to feel bad for Karate Warrior 5. Unless it has Jeff Stryker officiating a beach volleyball game or something.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

And into this nightmarish way life rides one man astride his chopper, ready to brawl with evildoers and romance native gals with access to a potassium mine! Yeah, it’s an apocalypse pretty much like you were hoping for!

Raiders Of The Sun was made by Cirio H. Santiago for Roger Corman. Cirio was pretty much the one man Philippine equivalent of the entire Italian trash movie industry. The titles of his films are a mouthwatering collection of junk that will instantly convert the uninitiated into Cirio fanatics!

Equalizer 2000, Dune Warriors, Future Hunters, and Wheels Of Fire are just a few of the more prestigious of his post-apocalyptic oeuvre alone! That he also shot a film called Bloodfist 2050 but somehow without Don “The Dragon” Wilson only cements his status as “Favorite Director Who Was Not Italian But Should’ve Been.”

At the beginning of Raiders Of The Sun there is some narration explaining how the world ended, but that’s just strictly boiler plate stuff, legally required to get us to the point where nameless groups of poorly dressed extras run around shooting and blowing each other up!

The Alpha League are the good guys and they’re fighting another group of losers for control of this really awesome quarry. You can tell everyone apart because the Alpha League wear yellow vests and one of the leaders of the bad guys commands his troops while wearing a hoghead, as if he was on his way to an Arkansas Razorback football game when Armageddon broke out.

The film follows the wasteland adventures of Talbot and Brodie. Talbot is a pretty generic guy who thinks the war is finally over and he can go home to his wife. Before he can get there though, his wife is kidnapped by the bad guys thus sending him on a search for her deep into the heart of enemy territory.

Brodie (Deathfight and Not Another Mistake’s Richard Norton) is mega cool with his blonde hair, dark beard, black leather pants, and open black leather jacket with no shirt. He rocks some mean kung fu when he has to and always seems to be hauling a giant gun, squeezing off rounds into whatever freak wanders by. He also gets hooked up with a bunch of midgets!

Cirio is obviously going for an epic feel with his almost 80 minute thriller by splitting the story between Talbot’s attempts to rescue his wife, Brodie’s quest for the hidden potassium mine, and the bad guys’ scheming to destroy the Alpha League once and for all.

There is a concern that perhaps Cirio is trying to cram too much into such a limited amount of time and that the movie might suffer from a lack of focus. Do not panic! The movie is excellent at maintaining its focus on stuff exploding!

Besides, you’ll be wrapped up in Brodie’s and Talbot’s situations in no time. With Talbot undercover in the evil gang, you’ll get to go on raids with him where he gets to see his buddies die, you’ll see him in a deadly rite of initiation that involves swinging on ropes while trying to club another to death, and you’ll see the big jail break where he and his old lady make their dash for freedom!

And don’t think that his old lady is just some piece of white trash arm candy (though she is that, too!) because she gives as good as she gets and manages to run over the guy in the hog helmet with his own car! Let me tell you something, brother – the end times is COLD!

But whither Brodie? After rescuing a native girl and getting shot for his troubles (thankfully not in the leather pants!), she takes him back to her secret village which just happens to be the very same village he was looking for that worships a potassium mine.

Their leader doesn’t want any outsiders because outsiders bring trouble, but Brodie is wise and says that trouble will find them anyway and trains the men in the village in stick fighting. He also has time to bang his new girlfriend and again demonstrates the wisdom of a guy who is getting banged regularly by saying that for the first time he knows what it is to be at peace.

Nothing is forever though! Especially in this new world where guys in leather pants are our wisest people! The bad guys roll in, steal gunpowder, kill Brodie’s girlfriend, and trap them all in a cave in!

The friendly midgets that Brodie saved earlier from being burned alive appear and dig Brodie and the villagers out of the cave in. Brodie heads back to the Alpha League to assist the final battle with the bad guys and when he gets out of a station wagon followed by about five or six midgets carrying buckets of gunpowder, the power of that scene is self-explanatory.

The best moments of the movie though occur when Brodie goes one on one with the leader of the bad guys. Karate fighting is the order of the day as kicks, punches, kneeings, head bashing, and assorting grapplings are delivered without mercy. That it was done to the chunky beats of the bad ass background music only made Brodie and his leather pants that much more awe-inspiring!

Raiders Of The Sun keeps getting better even as it ends when there’s a little victory parade where Brodie hugs Talbot and is taken through the assembled crowd of about ten people by his midget pals. It was kind of like the end of Star Wars when Han Solo and Luke and the rest were recognized by the Rebellion for their bravery. But with tight leather pants. To state the obvious, I, like Brodie, now know what it is to be at peace.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Olivier Gruner plays an emotionless mining cop who somehow gets almost emotionally involved in investigating his brother’s death. More importantly, he sports a pretty bad haircut (but not nearly as bad as the one in Savage) and throws his badge down on the ground after he finishes getting all sorts of vegeneace on pretty much the entire population of Mars.

The mining company is up on Mars to mine Silex which is some kind of something that’s a really great source of fuel for all us greedy Earthlings. Like all miracle discoveries in science fiction though, Silex turns out to be decidedly un-miraclous.

It turns out that Silex has a little bit of a side effect on those exposed to it. It gives them a good dose of the Martian Plague! Not the Martian Plague that gives everyone unsightly sores! Yes, that very Martian Plague!

But as cool as Martian Plague is, the Silex proves its mettle as miracle gunk whose breathrough uses are surpassed only by its breatkthrough medical problems by also causing heinous birth defects!

You can see where this one is going, right? Olivier Gruner battling to the death on the red-tinted sandy landscape of Mars against an army of mutant babies! It’s like director Jon Hess (The Lawless Land and Excessive Force) tapped into my brain and downloaded the wet dream I’ve been having since I could squirt standing up!

Despite this promising set up, Mars proves that in space, everyone with a hankering for lesser Olivier Gruner movies can see and hear you fail! How can you have a movie predicated on the awfulness of a mining corporation killing mutant babies in an effort to keep everyone in the dark about Silex’s horrible side effects, but never show me a freaking mutant baby? Just having something wrapped in a bundle and people looking at it like someone just crapped on their wedding cake isn’t going to cut it!

To be fair, the movie trotted out a full grown mutant that was the son of Pete the Hermit, but a Martian Elephant Man who shuffles around and hides upstairs in his bedroom is certainly no substitute for a squalling little brat with giant eyes, fangs and claws!

Lack of nasty deformed kids aside, Mars still has plenty to keep your own deformed kids borderlined entranced for a good 15 minutes or so. Olivier knows the conventions of this type of movie and thus his investigation takes him to the local strip club! The movie demonstrates a nice balance of action between shots of strippers swinging around poles and Olivier stabbing and punching miners!

Olivier also manages to get mugged as soon as he arrives in Alpha City, but it all worked out because he beat up a gang of roughnecks dispatched by the company to keep Olivier from digging too deep into his brother’s death. He also picks up the annoying chatterbox sidekick that helps him out the rest of the film. As obnoxious as he was, it was certainly preferrable to having Olivier hang around Shari Belafonte’s doctor character who was sporting a Susan Powter haircut.

Somehow, Olivier decides that a trip outside the domed city to visit old Pete the Hermit is just what the case needs and it turns out he’s right because once they get old Pete the Hermit talking, he tells us everything! I always like a movie where a single character is sitting out there waiting to be interviewed so that he can spill every bit of story we need to solve the mystery and finish up the movie.

It’s so much faster than having our hero visit the library, the local hall of records, and breaking into the bad guy’s office to take a peek at the incriminating file that was just left laying around on his desk. I also like a movie where news of this important meeting just happens to be overheard by someone who can report it to the bad guys. It makes the final confrontation so much easier to schedule.

Olivier gets embroiled in series of fights at the end of the film as he battles his way back to the head of the mining company who knew all along all the bad stuff that was happening and who wants Olivier dead.

Mars is the expected menu of low budget action violence where guys get punched, kicked, stabbed, shot, blown up, and set on fire. None of it was executed with any particular panache and nothing of much consequence was destroyed. (I’m probably spoiled by PM Entertainment’s movies where buses and cars are routinely flying through the air and blowing up.)

Olivier’s part doesn’t call for him to demonstrate much of anything beyond a vague irritated squint and the occasionally kickboxing eruption and thus he executes his role to perfection.

There is one thing that absolutely sinks the movie and it isn’t the bad computer graphics of spaceships landing on Mars which I thought was stolen from a early generation video game. It also isn’t the fact that most of the action on Mars seems to take place in steam tunnels and other grungy industrial locales that could’ve been any number of factories in my own town!

No, the single detail that you will remember from this movie when your friends are asking you to rate the Gruner movies you’ve seen is that they had someone else dub Gruner’s voice!

I’ll be the first to admit that in most of his other movies, I can’t understand half of what he is saying due to his soft-spoken French accent, but when you’ve grown up with him yammering like that, it kind of becomes part of the charm of any given Gruner film! Dubbing Gruner is like colorizing Frank Sinatra’s eyes or painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa! I kept trying to convince myself that Olivier just had a cold or that it was the Martian atmosphere affecting his sinuses, but in space everyone can hear your hideously dubbed voice!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Let me answer that question with one of my own: Who cares? So long as I having my teeth rattled by the thunderous crash of a cop car flying end over end all over some Los Angeles freeway, watching a limousine get ripped in half by a semi, or enjoying a Suburban full of Gary Daniels’ movie family tumbling down a cliff to a horribly painful death, the movie could be endorsed, funded, and co-starring Satan himself, and I’d be happy as a pig in a steaming mountain of feces!

What PM Entertainment achieves in Recoil is something akin to economical action movie Nirvana. The first third of the movie is merely the set up for the story driving the remaining hour which may seem like things are pretty slow to develop. Which it would be. If this wasn’t a PM Entertainment/Gary Daniels confection of carnage!

Remember that bank robbery shootout in North Hollywood in 1997 where the criminals wore body armor and had the police outgunned? The shootout lasted something like a hour before those guys got wasted. Now, imagine that same incident, but with like, 15 bad guys decked out in body armor, automatic weapons, and hand grenades! That would surely turn L.A. into hell on Earth, right? Yeah, it would. If Gary Daniels didn’t exist!

The armored-up scumbags are pretty much having their way with L.A.’s finest until Gary rolls onto the scene. Gary turns out to be the equivalent of about 50 invincible guys with nerves of steel and a heart as big as his Owen Wilson-esque nose!

Gary just starts walking up to these guys and begins dropping them with head shots! Gary picks up some grenades from the robbers and starts lobbing them at trouble spots! Gary’s mentor cop buddy dies in his arms and Gary kisses his crucifix and crosses himself! Gary rolls over cars and pulls a little girl to safety and kisses her on her little mop top head! He’s like some kind of Catholic Boys and Girls Club Terminator!

And then one robber attempts to make his escape on a motorbike! What follows is a nonstop parade of jumping and wrecked cop cars with Gary in hot pursuit! Even better, much of the chase sees everyone driving through a fifty mile long warehouse full of crates, barrels, palates, and ramps!

A great movie would be satisfied ending with all that action once the robber is cornered at the end of the warehouse. Bank robber caught, all’s well that ends well, right? Not for Recoil!

The guy on the cycle just turns around and drives over top of a car and goes back the other direction! By the time Gary and four other cops shoot the kid after mistakenly believing that he had a gun, we all needed a breather!

But guess what? Internal affairs has barely even had a chance to get on down to HQ to harass Gary about wasting punks when it turns out the dead kid was the son of a mob boss! And the mob boss (Sloan) wants revenge! And his surviving sons are more than willing to do whatever it takes to exact their vengeance on the officers involved! Whether it involves gunning them down during yet another car chase, during a bust of a hooker or even just walking into the police station and wasting poor Chang, it’s makes no difference to them!

Gary is understandably upset when he finds out all his friends have been killed (“I played soccer with Chang!” he exclaims in anguish.) while he was partying it up in Santa Barbara with his and his partner’s families.

It’s decided that Gary should lay low for awhile and the next thing you know, Gary is recuperating in a monastery and being told that his wife and kids were killed when their Suburban rolled down the side of a mountain.

There’s a leak in the police department which is why Gary is hiding out in the monastery. It also allows for a nice montage of stained glass windows and for some talk about forgiveness and all sorts of stuff that’s heresy in a good action film.

The several months Gary has spent recuperating have also allowed him the time to develop a cunning plan to get revenge on the guys who are trying to get revenge on him. He simply goes to Sloan’s house during a party and starts killing everyone!

For reasons that are lost in the haze of the collateral damage Gary inflicted at the party, Gary leaves before killing everyone. This allows Sloan to send his remaining sons here and there to get Gary. That in turn allows Gary to shoot the piss out of everyone, jump from a moving car to a limo and fight a guy in the sunroof before jumping off just before the limo’s fateful encounter with a semi! Gary either jumps or is blasted about four miles in the air and it’s so awesometacular you don’t even care that you can see the cable attached to Gary that’s yanking him through the air!

Gary surely isn’t going to provide you with any memorable lines and he exudes too much of a nice, laid-back guy vibe to really ever convince you that he’s gone over the edge, but that’s what us Gary Daniels fans like about him. He’s not about to his ego get in the way of wall-to-wall action.

Yes, his family are a bunch of annoying boobs – his kids fight over an Etch-A-Sketch and play Risk with his partner, but their deaths serve more than one purpose. Watching them die both thrills the audience and galvanizes Gary into a rage-fueled rampage! That’s just another example of how Recoil is the perfectly structured brainless action film starring no one you will ever remember, but whose car crashes you will never forget!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Gary is a British kickboxer who has appeared in a string of straight-to-video action movies including Rage and Riot. What his films lack in budget, originality, and entertainment value is generally made up for with excessive use of stunts and action scenes.

Gary himself comes across as relatively non-threatening, but is always more than willing to show some intensity with his fight scenes, so I usually zone out until I start to hear the dubbed smacking of his feet and hands landing on some grubby-looking thug. You also don’t want to look to hard at some the action scenes where guys get knocked through the air because it’s a crap shoot whether you’ll see the cable yanking them to and fro.

Those of you whose stomachs are churning at the thought of one of these action movies where the star plays twins (think every other Van Damme movie) and the distractingly stupid tricks the films inevitably use to show the “twins” at the same time (can you say “bad wig?”) will be relieved to know that Gary’s wuss twin, Oliver, is shot in the head early on in the film, thus limiting the interaction Gary has with himself to a scene where the surviving twin carries the dead twin to a dune buggy so he can be taken home and buried. And how can you not appreciate a film with a dune buggy hearse?

The twin that Gary spends most of the movie playing is Roland. Roland is a bounty hunter and when you see that he is dressed like some college kid going to a Halloween party as a gunslinger from a spaghetti western complete with stubble and cigar hanging out of his mouth, you’ll realize that modern civilization hasn’t been destroyed, but has just been replaced with a strange hybrid of “wild west meets standard post-apocalyptic motorcycle thugs” scenario complete with a disenfranchised group of outcasts known as Scavengers. The wild west aspect of things isn’t actually necessary beyond giving an excuse for Roland and his arch enemy Little Ray to dress like cowboys and twirl around six shooters and rifles.

Little Ray runs afoul of Roland when Roland learns that Little Ray has killed his brother. Oliver’s old lady escaped and is hiding out from Little Ray in Roland and Oliver’s family home. Little Ray is after her because she is pregnant with a child who has a gene that could help fight the plague that killed everyone.

Of course, if the plague already wiped out everyone that was susceptible to it, the value of that may be a little suspect. Besides, regardless of how serious that plague is, I think that if Earth wasn’t getting any sunlight, plague research would probably be taking a backseat to stuff like trying to stay alive.

In any case, Little Ray wants to ransom her off to the government while Roland is looking for revenge. Roland is also trying to atone for his haunted past since he got in a car wreck that killed his parents.

Oliver’s old lady hates him since she is reminded of Oliver whenever she sees Roland and also because of the pain he caused Oliver by killing their parents. I wouldn’t be losing a lot of sleep over what she thought about me though if I was Roland since she revealed that she and Oliver were saving all their money up to start a mushroom farm. You know, because mushrooms don’t need sunlight. And because when the world ends, the survivors are going to demand lots of mushrooms!

There isn’t really enough great action in this Gary Daniels movie like in Rage and some of that is because the movie feels like it’s been filmed on the same couple of sets with different angles and rearranged garbage masking the fact.

So you get motorcycles and dune buggies driving up and down alleys and streets that look pretty much the same and are mysteriously quite well lit for a world without sunshine. It doesn’t really do much for maintaining your interest and forces you to concentrate on the moronic story as well as Little Ray’s high maintenance facial hair.

You can’t really fault Gary since he gives it his all whenever he has the chance, kicking guys off motorcycles, spinning in the air, flipping over and shooting guns, but what am I supposed to think about your movie when Oliver’s old lady escapes in a helicopter and Little Ray has it shot down with the intent of capturing her alive by having it shot in the tail? And it works! I know this is supposed to be the wild west, but is Annie Oakely in his gang?

When Little Ray and Roland finally get down to business and fight it out, at least that gives us what we want. First, there’s the shoot out where they fire at each other through a wall separating them until they run out of bullets and have to dive clear of each other!

Then they agree to throw down their weapons and settle it like men! Lots of frenetic kick fighting and punching ensue and even an iron bar is used at some point.

Finally, they agree to finish it with this game where there’s one bullet for each gun and the first guy to load the bullet in the gun and shoot the other in the head wins!

This is definitely second-tier Gary Daniels and Gary isn’t helped with the idiotic setting and concept of the film. He also isn’t helped in scenes that require him to suggestively polish his rifle as he stares at his late brother’s wife giving herself a sponge bath. Ultimately, it is the audience that gets kicked in the face whenever Gary isn’t doing the same to someone on screen.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

A few hundred years in the future, man has spread to the stars and as in the case of most futures that involve something other than desert wastelands with mutant bikers harassing fertile women, there’s nothing much happening other than mining operations on various worlds.

Gruner plays a cop named Stokes who works on one of these worlds and who’s been set up to take the fall for murdering a fellow cop. There’s some type of backstory about Stokes and his old lady having a kid who died and somehow his old lady is now under contract to the evil manager of the mines. That’s really too bad for Stokes and all, but I was mentally urging them on so we could get to the part where Stokes gets assigned to the crappiest job in the known universe: security detail on a ship going into the Velocity Trap!

I was concerned that with this murder charge hanging over his head that Stokes would spend his time on some boring prison planet where he’d be forced to fight in some illegal kickboxing tournement set up by the sadistic warden those types of facilities inevitbly have. Improbably though, the manager of the mines explains that if Stokes was put on trial, it would embarass the department and if he just killed Stokes his old lady would cause trouble, so he’s just going to assign Stokes to this six month job babysitting a spaceship full of cash.

Huh? So who set him up and what was the point? If the evil mine manager was behind the frame up and had the authority to get him out of the murder charge, why not just assign him to this detail from the beginning? Without the pointless conspiracy?

If it was someone other than the mine manager, it makes even less sense from a story standpoint to include all that since nothing more is said about the incident. Sure, you have to get Stokes on board the ship to have the movie, but there’s less tortuous ways to do it. I mean, people have been forced into duty on ships for centuries without all this rigmarole. Heck, Britian was such a professional at this that it actually had an official organziation (the Impress Service) to do it!

In addition to Stokes, the crew of the ship with all the cash totals three. There’s the tough female navigator, the captain (Bruce Weitz who showed up in the Jeff Speakman killer satellite movie Memorial Day the next year) and another crew member named Cruz. I would complain about the fact that the only security a ship full of cash had was one cop who was only there because he was being punished, but this is a future where giant starships are run with as many employees as some modern day conveneince stores.

The first three months of the trip are uneventful with Stokes engaging in a montage of time killing escapes like doing exercises, ballet, and spitball target practice. Then the alarms signalling a collision go off! The collision turns out to be the space pirates docking with the ship and Stokes is just able to wake up the navigator to assist him in fighting off the theives.

The remainder of the film is a collection of scenes where Stokes is running through parts of the ship and fighting the thieves with space blasters. For no reason at all, Stokes even ends up falling down a tube right into the part of his ship that houses a killer robot! That would have been handy against the criminals if it wasn’t just stored in the basement!

Despite the fact that it’s just Stokes and the navigator against the looters, there are only about four of them, so it isn’t like he’s up against insurmountable odds. In fact, there’s so few criminals that near the end of things Stokes has to work with them to avoid being smashed up by an oncoming asteroid! I guess they knew what they were doing when they only assigned one guy to guard the ship.

These crooks are also the sort of dumb crooks who even though they manage to lock down the controls of Stokes’ ship so he and the navigator can’t change course, they somehow still allow Stokes access to an escape shuttle. Thus we are treated to the big dogfight in space before the bad guys let them land on their own ship. The navigator quickly plugs this potential plot hole by guessing that the criminals don’t have enough guys left on their own ship to prevent this. How many guys does it take to punch the “undock” button?

Gruner is a relatively inoffensvie presence though he always looks like he’s about ready to burst into tears and the sets and special effects aren’t as hideous as you would expect from a movie starring the Jean-Claude Van Damme of France. The ending is conveyed to us via a news report (which saves the time and money of actually shooting the scenes of what happened) and is as unconvincing as the rest of the story.

I won’t spoil it, but how was Stokes going to explain what happened if someone who recognized him ever saw him again? And the fact that no one seemed to connect his apparent disappearence with two other events described in the newscast would strain my suspsension of disbelief if I wasn’t so enamored with slow motion scenes of Stokes flying through the air due to various explosions and depressurizations. Ridiculous plot, decent action, and solid production values. Just the sort of thing you’re looking for amidst the rest of the space trash out there.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

I’m not about to waste valuable review space defending the Man against the Seagalaholics who have fallen off the wagon – movies like Today You Die can do it much more effectively.

Tired of Seagal being an ex-CIA guy on the lam from the Company while simultaneously trying to help someone else out? Well this time Sumo Steve is a thief who steals from scummy drug dealers and gives the proceeds (minus a small handling fee of course) to the poor.

But he’s looking to get out of the biz and go legit so that he and his girlfriend Jada can lead a normal life. So he gets a job driving an aromered car in Las Vegas and – wait a sec! Did I just say that Seagal had a girlfriend?

You better believe it! This isn’t your dad’s early 2000s straight to video Seagal! This is modern mid-2000s straight to video Seagal! And that means some heavy duty loving from our heavy duty action hero!

You get three different scenes in this film where Seagal is lying around in bed with his old lady. And if you think he’s ultra sauve when he’s mumbling some curse-filled putdown to a dirtbag right before he snaps an elbow, you should see him in the sack all decked out in big baggy sweat shirts! Big Steve knows not only what the ladies like, but what they need!

Jada isn’t just in the movie though to provide Steve with some relaxation in between shooting gangs of toughs, breaking out of prison, and teaming up with Naughty By Nature’s Treach to bring down the guys who framed him for something that he actually did! She’s got her own set of supernatural superpowers!

Jada frequently badgers Steve with her stupid dreams and visions and once in awhile we even get subjected to them via some really cheesey special effects. The best part of all this black magic hoodoo babble is that it turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the movie!

Except that the visions tell her that the bad guy is… a bad guy! You know, in case Steve didn’t figure it out when he was doublecrossed into a life sentence in prison.

The set up goes something like this: Steve is forced to drive an armored car at gun point through the streets of Las Vegas with $20 million in stolen loot in the back. Along the way, he single-handedly destroys the entire fleet of cop cars that Las Vegas has at their disposal.

Cars are rammed, cars flip through the air, cars slide down streets, cars roll over, cars explode, Seagal intentionally rear ends a camper and blows it up, is completely indifferent when the police set the armored car on fire, and eventually escapes long enough to hide the money before passing out and getting hauled off to prison.

What I like about Seagal in all these movies is that regardless of the situation he’s faced with, he never seems remotely bothered by it. Long prison sentence with everyone gunning for him because they want to force him to tell where the loot is? The only reaction that gets from Steve is a smug smirk, a comment about how he hit his head during the armored car chase and has amnesia about where the money is, and plenty of prison beat downs for the punks who try to get fresh with him.

But he’s still got enough upstairs to form an alliance with Treach who just happens to have an escape plan he’ll hook Seagal up with for a cut of the money. It involves an ex-Nam pilot who has a Sherrif’s helicopter in for repairs at a nearby hanger. You can guess the rest.

During their flight to freedom, Treach is hooting and hollering while the guards are shooting at them. You know what Seagal is doing? Laughing! It’s like he forgot the camera was on him and he couldn’t contain his amusement that he was getting paid to hang out with Naughty By Nature!

Once Steve is back on the street and properly outfitted in an absurd floor-legnth brown leather coat, he can get down to brass tacks. This means that he and Treach engage in hilariously stilted exchanges as they cruise around Vegas looking for guys to shoot.

Between Treach’s G-Bonics (hey, that’s what he called it in prsion!) and Seagal’s mouth full of marbles, I didn’t catch most of what was being said, but I’ll bet it was awesome!

But I caught enough to understand that Seagal managed to arrange a gang war between an Asian gang and a white gang. It had something to do with Steve’s quest for revenge or to clear his name or to get his money or something.

Lots more Seagal-inspired violence (and inspired Seagal violence!) follows including Steve sticking a guy’s head in a vise, shooting a guy inside a car, then having it torched while maintaining to Treach that the guy was depressed and shot himself, and of course a showdown with the evil Max.

Max’s hideout was decked out with occult knick knacks and lots of lit candles and Max himself was playing a piano. Max announces that he was born with evil inside him or something along those lines and Seagal responds as only Seagal can: “That’s chilling. You also seem to have a great propensity for music.” Then he shoots everyone! And because this is pure Seagal gold, there was still another extended shoot out sequence after this one!

Miss this one and risk your credibility as a true action movie fan! Must be seen for the moment when Steve uses the word “jejune” in a sentence!

© 2011 MonsterHunter