The Sender is idiotic on an interstellar level and is so awful it doesn’t know when to end insisting instead to aimlessly ramble on for ten minutes after Area 51 has been blown to smithereens! You would think that director Richard Pepin would be itching to bail out since the movie’s story only putrefied more and more as it went along, but there he is giving us scenes of poorly realized aliens waving and endless reunion and goodbye moments like he was getting paid a bonus for surpassing the 90 minute mark!

Pepin really ought to know better since he also directed one of PM Entertainment’s great sci-fi/action hybrid flicks, Dark Breed as well as one its worst, The Silencers. Sadly, instead of the brawny-tough-as-nails-alien-invasion-thwarted-by-Jack-Scalia action of Dark Breed what we end up with in The Sender is closer to the nonsensical evil government/good guy alien mish-mash that sunk The Silencers.

The Sender was pretty much everything I hate in my earthbound science fiction movies, what with its super advanced aliens who never show much advancement, except when the plot dictates it.

For instance, The Sender features an alien that can produce fire balls, sense when people are after her, can cure cancer and bullet wounds, fly around in an advanced spaceship with cloaking features and other gizmos that our government desperately wants.

She can also shape shift into different people, generate whatever clothes she wants, and somehow was able to watch our main character (Michael Madsen in a role that requires him to do nothing more than to take off his sunglasses periodically) grow up and see every important event of his life without him ever knowing she existed! She can even apparently appear and disappear at will.

So why in the world is she spending most of the movie getting chased by R. Lee Ermey’s goons? Why is her spaceship able to be hit by a surface to air missile, but only to the extent that it disables the cloaking device and weapons systems? Why does it take Madsen half the movie to figure out that he and her are being tracked through his pager? And why doesn’t she do a better job of protecting Madsen’s child who is the object of all the car chases? (This is the sort of alien who is content to let a car chase go on for several miles before suddenly deciding to send a fire ball here or there to allow her and Madsen to temporarily escape.)

She and Madsen eventually allow themselves to be captured, presumably so that they would be taken to the facility where his daughter is being held at. This is another bit I never get in these movies. Why do the bad guys always take the people they capture to the same location as the person the good guys are searching for?

And in this particular case, why would you assume the bad guys would take you prisoner when they’ve spent the whole movie trying to kill you? Shoot, the blew up Madsen’s house and R. Lee personally pumped several bullets into Madsen at point blank range in an effort to kill him!

The story borders on being too dumb to even repeat but it involves some mumbo jumbo about an alien gene that Madsen’s daughter possesses that makes her capable of being a Sender which means she can generate a green ball that allows her to travel places, including outer space. The government naturally wants her for their own purposes while the aliens don’t think the earth governments are ready to have that power.

How did she get this alien gene? Don’t know. How did the aliens know one little girl on one little planet in the entire universe had it? Never explained. How does the government know she has it and what it means she is capable of? Who knows! This is a PM Entertainment movie so we’ve got an RV to crash into a truck loaded with hay bales!

And how come these smart ass aliens always send only one of them on these ultra important missions? There was a big mothership screwing around with Madsen’s fighter pilot father in the Bermuda Triangle back in the 1960s during that pointless prologue and the big mothership suddenly appears again at the end of the movie, but where were they when all the chasing and shooting were going on?

And why did they save Madsen’s father from when his jet crashed into the ocean, but not return him to his family for thirty years? And when he finally was returned, he was the same age and wearing the exact same clothes as on the day when he crashed three decades before! What was all that about?

And then there’s whole self-destruct sequence at Area 51! Somehow, the head bad guy (The X-Files‘ Steven Williams wearing ridiculously spray-painted on white eyebrows, hair and mustache) causes the “core” to be breached or melt down or whatever. What kind of core does Area 51 have? And why can you punch a few buttons to make it blow up?

And then Steve tries to play the old “let me have your daughter or half of Nevada will be destroyed” card! Me and Madsen were pretty much, “so what – we don’t know anybody in Nevada and we’ve got a super powered alien on our side” and then Area 51 blows up anyway!

Completely abominable on an intergalactic scale, if I was The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Robert Vaughn, I’d be more embarrassed by this then by either Zombie 5: The Killing Birds or those commercials he does for law firms that always seem to air during daytime talk shows.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Other than ex-special forces guys who know some off-brand kung fu, who knows the most about wanton violence and reckless cussing? Rappers! Those guys are always shooting each other, burning their houses down, stealing each other’s bling, and calling each other out in song with such a proficiency in profanity that it would make a pissed off drill sergeant envious! And for a company as bottom-line conscious as PM Entertainment, rappers are awesome because they provide their own weapons and wardrobe!

PM Entertainment was the company behind all manner of destruction during the 1990s including a billion Gary Daniels flicks (Rage, Riot), a little Jeff Speakman (Running Red, Hot Boyz) and the Jack Scalia sci-fi canon (Dark Breed, The Silencers) among many other thrillers.

It’s understandable then that they were the ones that had the vision to work with Master P behind and in front of the camera! They were also the ones that pretty much ceased to exist a few years later. I don’t have any inside information, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t have something to with not making any more Master P films!

It only takes about five seconds for Master P to show he has grasped the intricacies of the PM action movie when we find ourselves at a warehouse where some sort of arms shipment has come in. Zags is in charge, but somehow Master P has come to believe that he has been cut out of some lucrative deal so he and his posse roll in to cut themselves back in!

Before you have any time to even worry about whether Master P knows anything about making a movie, he’s using the flamethrower to set stunt men on fire and the rocket launcher to send them flying through the air before blowing them up!

Once Master P has melted everything down, the real movie gets underway and we find Jason (Gary Daniels) working at shipping company with Davis (Jeff Fahey). Since the only way an ass kicker like Gary Daniels would be working at a shipping company would be if he was in some deep cover for something or other, it isn’t shocking to learn that he’s an FBI agent who is trying to get close to the arms dealer that Master P thinks stiffed him earlier.

Davis is his connection and manages to simultaneously humiliate himself and make the audience cringe with his repeated references to being spanked by a hooker. Jason falls in love with this hooker which is the least believable part of the film as any normal person couldn’t even look at this woman without remembering that Davis liked to pretend that she was his third grade teacher Mrs. Brown!

Our focus though isn’t on Davis, but on Jason getting close with Busey’s arms dealer character, Noah. Busey, appearing almost normal here, is trying to broker a deal for plutonium blasting caps between some Chinese crime organization and another guy.

Despite Jason and Noah scheming and counter-scheming, Master P still periodically pops up in the movie, though only when it appears that Master P suddenly remembers he was supposed to be in the movie! So we’re treated to a totally pointless sequence at his recording studio where we watch some rapping before Noah’s men storm the place to kill Master P.

P pulls out his two gold-plated pieces and starts blasting everyone, resulting in an impressive amount of carnage where hundreds of guys manage to find their way through every single piece of glass in the building. Master P survives and the entire scene could have been cut out with zero impact on the story. On balance though, having Master P shoot tons of guys outweighs any pacing and plotting concerns.

Less forgivable as far as extraneous scenes go though are the two love scenes between Jason and the hooker you will have to fast forward through. They also have a rather lengthy conversation on a beach that is infinitely more deadly than any of Master P’s violent outbursts.

No Tomorrow comes to the sort of conclusion you hope for though when everyone converges for the big arms deal at a desert airfield.

Some questionable double-crosses occur, but it all leads up to Jason stealing a cargo plane that everyone else seems to manage to also sneak aboard resulting in an unfortunate and hilarious mid-flight incident where Master P. stabs Noah in the leg before Jason has to crash land the whole freaking thing! If you’re a No Limit Solider like I am, this is one flick that will “Make ‘Em Say Uhh!”

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Never mind the team finished 0-11 last year and is called North Dingleberry A&T Tech. Then you have to listen to Coach cry about his team. Every guy on scholarship is hurt, the only guys left are a couple of gimpy sixth-year benchwarmers who can barely hold the clipboard during practice and some freshmen that are so young and green that the women’s basketball team has heavier beards than them! We probably ought to just forfeit, says Coach, to save our state the humiliation that will surely occur on Saturday. Then they play the game and we blow out the crappy nothing team just we knew all along!

Rage is a lot like Coach and his poor mouthing. Shucks, I’m just another dingy, low budget action movie with a guy who kicks people in the face, Rage whimpers to the audience. Another Gary Daniels/Joseph Merhi team up just like Riot, but not as awesome because we don’t have Sugar Ray Leonard this time! Shoot, in Riot, we had an entire city going bananas! Rage only has one guy going ballistic. There’s no way Rage can even get a whiff of Riot‘s jockstrap, let alone hold that stinky bastard!

Oh, Rage, you crafty devil! It manages to not only be as good as Riot, but to surpass it on every level, right down to the increase in screen time of Kenneth Tigar as the idiotic TV reporter!

Just how does it manage to kick it up a notch over a movie that had Sugar Ray falling several stories to his death? When Gary hijacks a fuel tanker truck, I knew instantly that it could only end with Gary diving out before the tanker crashed into something, causing an explosion the likes of which hasn’t been seen since that asteroid killed off the dinosaurs!

And it did! But only after about 20 minutes of total highway carnage that had Gary destroying countless cop cars, engage in a battle of the big rigs (that also saw a welcome cameo from some CB talk!), and ultimately playing chicken with a school bus driven by the evil sheriff that got Gary into this mess in the first place!

Even when we finally get to the expected crash up, Rage shows it’s here to devastate the competition! Lots of sissy films would’ve had the hero dive out of the cab of the tanker truck, rolling safely down an embankment. Rage has Gary tie the steering into position, lock the gas pedal in place and then climb out on top of the cab! Just as the vehicles collide head on, Gary jumps over all of it, flying and rolling through the inferno-like explosion before somehow landing unscathed on the highway ahead of the horrific wreck!

So just how did Gary get himself into this particular mess since he’s the nicest second grade teacher ever? On his way back from dropping his daughter off at a slumber party, he gets carjacked by a guy attempting to elude local law enforcement who are trying to take him to a secret lab where experiments are being done to turn people into perfect killing machines! Naturally, when the cops get a gander at Gary’s buff bod, they kidnap him and give him a dose at the lab. The drug apparently works a little too well since Gary proceeds to destroy the place and kill scores of people before his escape!

The media picks up on the government version of the story that says Gary has gone nuts and killed a federal agent. Gary is the subject of an intensive manhunt and no place is safe! From Gary’s destructive powers that is!

A series of stunt and fight-laden scenes follow, all with that special Rage touch. Breaking into a house for some grub and to use the phone, Gary ends up fighting a couple of kinky, leather-clad freaks! Can’t Gary catch a break?

Some action at the top of a skyscraper follows with Gary periodically falling here and there before jumping onto the helicopter that keeps shooting at him. Gary somehow manages to survive falling off the helicopter and dropping about five miles by landing in a greenhouse! A trip to his sensai’s boat and a final shattered-glass intensive shootout at the local mall wrap things up nicely.

Rage‘s emphasis on lots of crazy action is just as much a survival instinct as it is for entertainment purposes since the movie turns into a giant roundhouse kick in the head whenever it’s time for the characters to spew out the dialogue that gives us the plot. The scenes at the TV station and with the governor are as bad as anything you will ever seen on your TV outside of public access. Between the horrible dialogue and the incompetent way it’s delivered, you’ll be wishing for an actor with the experience of a Sugar Ray Leonard!

Most of the story didn’t make any sense since the effect the rage drug had on Gary wasn’t very clear. It made him cramp up now and again, but wasn’t it just as likely that all the beat downs he gave people was because he was an expert kickboxer and not due to the drug’s effects? The movie never said he was, but he had a freaking sensai!

And how does the governor of a state have the authority to call off a manhunt? Especially if the manhunt is being conducted by some shadowy federal government/defense contractor consortium? And if you’re doing secret testing at a super secret lab, should you really be abducting second grade teachers in broad daylight right on a city street?

But you know what? I expected all that from Rage! Bad acting and garbage plots are the bread and butter of these types of movies that star guys who are really good at kicking stuff. What I didn’t expect was that Gary Daniels would be swinging through malls, busting up video stores full of posters for other movies from Rage‘s production company, and beating up 20 guys while in a strait jacket! I did expect him to slide under a table and come up kicking a guy in the nuts, but I still loved it when it happened! And it all ends with a hilariously heavy-handed monologue by the obnoxious reporter!

Rage is another great Gary Daniels super stunt spectacular that’s predictably sucky in the expected spots, but top-notch (in a low budget way) in the areas that movies like this need to excel at.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Buck is the canine guardian of a camp of gold miners headed up by Zeb (Bruno Minniti who teamed with director Tonino Ricci in such favorites as Days Of Hell, Rage, and Thor The Conqueror) and his son with longish pansy hair, Kevin.

When the Whip Gang invades and kills everyone though, Buck demonstrates the wisdom of a thousand normal butt-sniffing dogs by allowing himself to be caught and hauled off to be used for some dog fighting back in town!

Obviously, this would allow time to come up with a solid revenge scheme.  A scheme that has Buck battling another dog while the guys in charge of the dog fights inexplicably brawl amongst themselves until the good guys appear and break it up!

That the magic bracelet hasn’t even played into any of this shows that this tag team effort from Ricci and American exploding car movie company PM Entertainment is nothing to lift your leg up and piss all over!

After the too-short slow motion massacre laid on the miner’s camp, trapper Natty and his sidekick, the faux-Indian medicine man Shanka, arrive to find that Kevin has somehow survived.  There’s no trace of Zeb, though since he was shot twice and dumped in the river, things don’t look too good for him.

Natty patches up Kevin and they leave the camp to head back to town, but not before Shanka leaves a note for Zeb in case he gets better from his bullet wounds and hypothermia and returns to the camp.

Kevin wisely advises that Buck might come back as well, but how will he know what’s happening since he can’t read?  Shanka immediately performs some juju mojo voodoo and announces that Buck can now read!

If you’re like me, you no doubt are now having visions of a bespectacled Buck poring over the sports section of the Winnepeg Sun checking out the latest CFL scores.  Unfortunately, Shanka turns out to be the con man everyone says he is because at no time during the film does Buck show any interest in the written word!

It’s hard to feel sorry for Shanka when a trapper threatens him for selling him some fake medicine and when he runs afoul of some real Indians who smear him with honey and threaten him with a giant beehive!

But as is usually the case when a giant beehive makes its appearance in a movie, things begin to get borderline entertaining!

A bracelet that Shanka has given Kevin turns out to be all sorts of magic! Kevin throws a trinket from it and a giant smoke bomb goes off freeing Shanka from his honey-lathered deathtrap!  But that’s just some opening act magic because right after that the freaking beehive starts floating in the air and going after the Indians!

The bracelet also enables Kevin and friends to find his father, transport people from place to place and to make them immaterial!  It also turns a bad guy’s knife into a bunch of flowers!  It’s magic AND wacky!

A magic bracelet is only as good as the plot it services though!  And being that this is Buck’s, Ricci’s, and Minniti’s final film, all the stops are pulled out like the bullet dug out of Kevin by Natty with just a knife while Shanka pretends to faint!

The Whip Gang is lead by a Bible-toting woman who is supposedly the mother of the rest of the miscreants in the gang.  As far as sadistic gangs go, they’re pretty good with Bobby Rhodes (Demons, War Bus Commando) as Goliath and Falcon Crest vet Abby Dalton as the deranged leader.

This isn’t some family friendly movie where the bad guys do prat falls either.  They’re stabbing, shooting, and whipping hapless trappers when they aren’t setting each other on fire and chucking their own off a cliff!

But what about the Zeb?  Proving that these arctic cowboys were as tough as the era’s dogs were smart, Zeb makes it back to town, recovers, is accused by the Mounties of killing everyone in the camp for the gold (despite showing them where the gold was and that he somehow would have had to kill about ten other guys while his kid and super dog watched), escapes, and goes after the Whip Gang himself!

That’s all pretty bad ass, but the less said about how he got boondoggled by the leader of the gang and had to be bailed out by the sharpshooting Natty, the better.

When the Whip Gang finally square off against Natty, Shanka, Kevin, Zeb, and Buck, it’s pure Italian movie mayhem at its best!

There’s the hoped-for showdown among two giants of unknown 1980s Italian movies, Rhodes and Minniti, that involves Minniti clubbing Rhodes with a giant log.

There’s Kevin’s magic bracelet causing all sorts of mischief including allowing him to punch a guy about a hundred feet in the air.

There’s also a very nice paper-mâché avalanche that surely necessitated the disclaimer at the beginning of the film regarding the safety of the animals involved in the film.  The disclaimer was in Italian so I am just assuming that it said no horses suffered anything worse than bruised dignity when they were knocked over by some fake rocks.

As for the viewer, only a mild case of heartache will be experienced when the movie concludes with a group photo, what with this being so many great showbiz folks’ final work. Twenty-five years after Ricci contributed to Italy’s first wave of wilderness dog movies with White Fang To The Rescue, he puts an exclamation point on the genre by leaving a Buck-sized dump of a movie full of enchanted jewelry, minimal dog action, 19th century special effects and bad dubbing for all to savor!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

It isn’t just homophobia that the smooth chested and ripped Gary combats in this film either. While he’s at home, stripped to the waist, working out, and glistening with hunk dew, he hears the smoke alarm in his apartment building going off! The unsupervised neighbor kids are at it again, this time trying to cook a frozen pizza without taking it out of the box! He saves the kids, gets the smoke under control and has them over to his place for some good old fashioned Chinese food! He ever teaches the little turds how to use chopsticks!

Thankfully though, the city is burning (well at least the same city block the movie shows us again and again when it’s not using stock footage of the L.A. riots) and civil disorder is everywhere before Gary manages to turn this movie into an after school Special on fire safety and good nutrition. The kids though provide us with valuable plot points as they interrogate Gary about what his job is. He’s in America training American soldiers, presumably in the deadly kickboxing techniques that won him the Light Heavyweight Title and left him undefeated! Just think how great all those bar fights between marines and navy guys are going to be when they’re all proficient with kickboxing!

Following Gary and Sugar Ray’s night out at the pool hall, the military comes by and takes the duo to the British Embassy. Some of you may be wondering what Sugar Ray Leonard is doing in this movie. He plays a major in the army who is Gary’s best friend. He’s also the helicopter pilot in charge of flying Gary in and out of Gary’s suicide mission that he picks up at the British Embassy. In short, he plays the part that Fred “The Hammer” Willimson would usually play if this movie were made by Italians. Of course, I don’t remember Fred falling to his death from a skyscraper, but there is a freaking riot going on!

Gary’s impossible mission where he’ll be outnumbered 30-1 is to go and rescue the ambassador’s daughter, Anna Lisa, who’s been kidnapped by a gang banger named Shyboy! The area she’s being held at is a no man’s land inhabited only by gang members, looters, and terrified shopkeepers! Gary has less than 3 hours to deliver the $2 million ransom to Shyboy and he has to do so by himself! Oh, and there’s just one more thing – the gal he has to rescue is his ex-fiancee! Whom he still loves! If the city thinks it’s seen a riot so far, just wait and see what happens when Gary goes after the potty-mouth animals holding his old lady hostage!

Though the city has only been rioting for a couple of hours, it’s already turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland! The first problem Gary encounters is a gang dressed up in street hockey gear! This makes for a good first workout since there’s all these hockey sticks for Gary to whack people with. These idiots are also on rollerblades which allows for lots of flying leaps, tripping, and flipping onto the ground.

You might be thinking, “what sort of morons hear about riots and decide to get all dressed up for roller hockey to harass fellow citizens? Would that really happen?” That’s just how tenuous our hold on civilization is! We’re just a good riot or two away from a world depicted in films such as The New Barbarians and Bronx Warriors! Think about that the next time you’re about to vote for liberals and against law and order!

Gary manages to free Anna Lisa from the clutches of Shyboy though he does get her friend killed. To be fair to Gary, he didn’t know her and his impossible suicide mission wasn’t to rescue some broad he didn’t care about. I was a little concerned though since Gary managed to accomplish this pretty early in the movie, but when Shyboy starting firing a rocket launcher at them and blasted their escape helicopter out of the sky, I breathed a little easier.

So Gary goes and gets revenge against Shyboy by having a final, no holds barred street fight with him, right? Wrong! This isn’t just some action movie, this is based on actual riots! Remember the stock footage?

As you’ve probably already guessed, the Irish Republican Army shows up and kills Shyboy, takes the money and goes after Gary and Anna Lisa! It turns out the IRA was just using the riot as a cover to kidnap the British ambassador’s daughter to use her as a bargaining chip in whatever dispute they have with the British government! Keep that crap on your side of the pond, you ignorant blokes! No one over here cares about any of that IRA stuff! We couldn’t even be bothered to go see Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt in The Devil’s Own!

Riot realizes all this and once Bryan O’Flaherty’s motivation is briefly mentioned it’s all about unrelenting violence! Gary’s attacked by a bunch of motorcycle riders and one guy even gets set on fire and still comes after Gary before crashing into a couple of cars and exploding! And you better believe that causes Gary to run straight at the camera and get blown off his feet in slow motion!

Gary also manages to find a junkyard in the middle of Los Angeles to fight a bunch of these punks in! Guys are slammed into car doors, Gary pops out from under the hood of a car to kill people, and Anna Lisa is wounded!

Next stop is the parking garage where Gary and O’Flaherty engage in a deadly game of demolition derby that ends spectacularly with Gary diving out of his car as it plummets off the parking garage and swinging from rope high above the ground as all kinds of stuff, including O’Flaherty, blows up below!

Once the movie gets going after Gary gets done kickboxing that burnt up pizza, he cuts a very impressive swath of destruction through things! Sure, all the action seems to take place on the same city block, the softball team consists of about a fifty guys who never seem to get hurt, and the IRA goons number in the millions, but come on! Gary is getting run over by cars, pursued by construction equipment, having a shoot out in a church, and dropping Sugar Ray to his death 50 stories to the ground!

What Gary and director Joseph Merhi (Rage, Zero Tolerance, Executive Target) understand is that an action movie should have action! You don’t need a significant budget to set stunt men on fire and throw them through plate glass windows! You just need a kickboxing champ to make it happen!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Professional macho man Jack Scalia plays a guy haunted by his past! But not just any guy! As we’re told by a dude checking out his credentials, Scalia was special forces in Vietnam, winning the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and even the frigging CMH! That’s Congressional Medal of Honor to you liberal pansies who hid in Canada when your country needed you most!

After single-handedly kicking so much ass in Nam that the we didn’t get run out of there in 1970 like we otherwise would have, Scalia signed up for the only other thing a highly decorated guy who doesn’t know any other way to live than at Mach 4 could – astronaut!

Fricking Aquarius II mission to be exact! You remember that one, right? Scalia and other Delta Force astronauts went up to that secret space station no one even knew was up there and mixed it up with a bunch of alien invaders!

Things got so damn harry that Scalia and his crew were fighting those suckers with bayonets! Blade to blade with Charlie in some rat-infested tunnel or against a bunch of slimy alien parasites in outer space – it’s all the same to Scalia!

Well, just like back in the Nam, Scalia lost a lot of good buddies on this space mission, too. The mission ended with him blowing up everything as he sped off in his spaceship, the only survivor! And now he lives with the memories every time the movie needs to provide us with some backstory.

Scalia paid the price on the home front as well, his marriage ending in divorce. I guess it would be hard for a spouse to understand the sort of stress an astronaut would be going through. After all, it’s not like she’s an astronaut or anything!

Except that she is! And she is on the latest Aquarius secret mission! And something has gone wrong again! Very wrong! And only one man stands between our wife of life and having to send his alimony check to a no good alien!

As you might have guessed from the above, an organization within the government decided that what they needed was a specimen of the aliens that attacked Scalia’s crew because they would make perfect killing machines.

They sent out some transmissions to lure the aliens to a space station, then sent up the most recent Aquarius mission with the intention of getting them infected. The shuttle would return to Earth with the infected astronauts and the government could do whatever they needed to get their perfect killing machines.

But the turd in that tasty soup was that the astronauts panicked when they got infected, flew back home early, crashed their shuttle, and escaped!

Director Richard Pepin (Firepower, Hologram Man, CyberTracker) realizes that Scalia needs to be turned loose in some exciting action sequences so the audience doesn’t get bogged down hating the movie for its stupid story.

And Pepin unleashes Scalia right from the beginning! One of those fifteen minute freeway stunt spectaculars that production company PM Entertainment used to such good effect in movies like Gary Daniels’ Rage opens up the film in great fashion! How can you not love it when Scalia and his astronaut best friend are beating each other silly in a mobile home on the back of a semi?

Best friend? You bet! Wife and best friend on the same mission! A lot of law enforcement agencies won’t assign a guy to a case if its too personal, but the guys in this movie seem to be trying to find the most personally involved dude available!

Which is great because it allows for moving scenes such as when Scalia hears the oldies CD playing in the aliens’ warehouse hideout that he gave his best friend as a going-into-space present before the ill-fated mission! Scalia is so cool that he hands out his own soundtrack for his haunted past!

The greatest moments in the movie are provided by the second freeway stunt spectacular, this time when Scalia and his crew are cruising in their electronics-laden van, complete with gigantic satellite dish on top!

No sooner does the car chase begin between the evil government forces and Scalia, who’s now on their bad side for some reason, then that satellite dish comes crashing down and gets dragged through the streets by the cable still connecting it to the van. Scalia goes out the back of the van to cut it loose, but somehow ends up inside the dish, riding that bastard around the freeway like it was a sled!

The rest of the film is just as great with lots of glass getting broken, guys set on fire, stuff exploding, and Scalia hanging from a helicopter!

And just to further complicate matters regarding the whole alien invasion angle, Scalia’s ex is actually possessed by a good alien known as a Watcher!

The bad aliens are Dark Breed and the Watcher is going to help out Scalia. Why these lazy aliens didn’t send a little more back up than that I didn’t understand, but what really caught me off guard was that Scalia’s ex had a much better personality when the alien possessed her than when she was herself. And the actress playing her was much more convincing as the alien, too!

There’s lots more special touches in the film that set it apart from the run-of-the-mill alien invasion trash movie, including an entirely pointless and nonsensical scene in a diner where Scalia’s alien possessed ex gives a waitress a bunch of lip about not being able to order pizza for breakfast.

This movie was so epic that when it came out on VHS, the tape was green! It’s like the Dark Breed possessed the videotape itself! I kept waiting for Scalia to come crashing through my front door on his satellite dish to save my sorry ass! But it would have been too late! This movie already kicked it up and down my living room without mercy!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2011 MonsterHunter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2008 MonsterHunter