Hero and the Terror (1988)

If you should see Hero and the Terror — and I’m certainly not suggesting you do — pay close attention to the scene in which Chuck Norris works out at the gym. As he’s lifting weights, all these other muscle-bound guys gather ’round to watch him push it real good. Chuck grunts as he does so. Now, close your eyes during this part and tell me it doesn’t sound like gay porn. You can’t, because it totally does.

Pointless experiment over. Anyway, Norris stars as half of the title, and you get one guess as to which half. He’s Danny O’Brien, a cop, who once upon a time, took down the other half of the title, the serial killer of women Simon Moon (Jack O’Halloran). Danny still has bad dreams of wandering into Moon’s dead hooker depository, which doesn’t exactly bode well for the good guy — now reduced to a minimum-wage worker on a Mexican food truck — when Moon escapes and starts killing them bitches all over again.

We’re to believe, of course, that Chuck Norris could defeat Jack O’Halloran, but c’mon! We’ve all seen Superman II. Besides, Moon busts out of prison simply by bending the bars, because, after all, he is General Zod’s sidekick Non, period.

There’s a subplot about Danny inseminating his girlfriend (Brynn Thayer of TV’s Matlock). I distinctly remember that when Chuck was making the promotional rounds for this so-so, by-the-numbers effort, he appeared on The Tonight Show with the clip of him passing out at the hospital on the impending birth of their bastard child. The audience cracked up, because, as Norman Mailer once wrote, tough guys don’t faint! Or something like that. —Rod Lott

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