After a decade of directing such saucy shorts as For Men Only, Pete Walker finally cracked the hourlong barrier with the Carnaby Street crime caper The Big Switch.

One night, professional ad exec and unprofessional blue-eyed fuckboy John Carter (Sebastian Breaks, The Night Digger) leaves a London discotheque with a lovely bird (Erika Raffael, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush). They head to her pad for a proper shagging. Whilst Carter first goes ’round the corner to grab some cigs for post-coital smoking, she’s shot dead by a hitman hiding in her shower. Talk about a case of the blue balls, mate — when Carter finds her body, no wonder touches the gun left behind and vamooses without phoning the authorities.

Which is exactly what local gangster/club owner Mendez (Derek Alyward, Walker’s School for Sex) counts on. He blackmails Carter into a secret assignment with a beautiful model named Karen (Virginia Wetherell, Walker’s Man of Violence). Neither Karen nor Carter have a clue what they’re in for — and I ain’t telling, either — but they hope it doesn’t involve their deaths.

This sleek, quick pic is a real fanny-slapper, like a men’s pulp paperback come to life. On cheap paper, those hard-charging, easy-bedding heroes could trot through formulaic exploits dozens upon dozens of times. The Carter character could have fronted an equal amount of adventures, yet went no further.

I enjoyed Walker’s first true feature from start to its photo finish, a marvelously fun sequence that places its climactic chase and shootout within a boardwalk arcade and ghost train attraction. After the baddies are dispatched or discombobulated, the po-po show up and invite Karen and Cater to the station for a cuppa tea.

“Sounds groovy,” Karen says earlier in the film, to which Carter coldly replies, “It is.” They may as well be talking up The Big Switch. —Rod Lott

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Seven Snipers is one of those movies where you just know the first line of dialogue telegraphs — if not DMs — how the climax will play out. That’s standard op procedure for a setup so plain and simple: With a $10 million bounty on her head, former sniper Voodoo Child (Radha Mitchell, Silent Hill) is targeted for death by people from her past.

Having 116 verified kills over your career is bound to do that to a girl. Since leaving that particular skill set behind, Voodoo’s lived off the grid in the picturesque Australian countryside with a daughter (Annabel Wolfe, My Pet Dinosaur) bratty enough to skip school to bang boymeat.

One morning, a supposed real estate developer (Ryan Kwanten, Flight 7500) shows up at packin’ more than a fancy business card. One shootout — and bulldozer attack — later, Voodoo knows the next person to turn up for revenge will be The Dragon (Tim Roth, 2022’s Resurrection), so she calls former co-workers for reinforcement. Dropping in via helicopter, they also have stupid codenames, such as Milk (Ioan Gruffudd, San Andreas).  

I wish I could say Seven Snipers has more to offer than exchanges of gunfire while Roth scurries around in a shaggy grass suit for camouflage. But that’s all it is. Although it’s nice to see a woman, The Dustwalker’s Sandra Sciberras, in the director’s chair of something as male-coded as gun porn, the Oz action film is predictable, right down to trained experts exhibiting perfect aim … except when presented with the easiest, clearest shots, of course. Like everything in the characters’ sights, you see each beat coming from a mile away. —Rod Lott

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Courier of Death’s antihero protagonist, J.D., carries a .44 Magnum, but don’t confuse him with arguably the movies’ most iconic cop. J.D. taunts criminals with lines like, “Go ahead, I’m gonna blow big holes in both your legs,” which isn’t as terse, pointed or quotable as “Go ahead, make my day.” Plus, he looks like the dumpier, dumber, less sociable kid brother of Tackleberry from the Police Academy saga.

In other words, he’s no Dirty Harry. “Unkempt J.D.” is more like it.

As played by some doughy dope named Joey Johnson, J.D. and his partner, Frank (Bill Hupfer), are shepherding a detonator-wired briefcase containing $76 million in bonds when bad guys attack. Frank is shot dead in the hubbub. Soon after, J.D.’s homely wife (Joan Becherich) gets murdered as well, leaving our denim-jacketed do-gooder to take down “the organization” behind it, via the only way he can: Acting like a ill-tempered toddler who hasn’t yet the mastered the art of the put-down. Not that his opponents hold an advantage …

Bar Thug: “You think you’re hot shit, don’tcha?”
J.D.: “Yeah!”
Bar Thug: “But you’re dog meat.”
J.D.: “And you’re a miserable little fuck!“

Like all the “grieving” husbands you see on Dateline, J.D. bounces back from the loss of his wife like a handball against brick. The new object of his affection, if you can call what he exhibits as such an emotion, is her friend Kate (Barbara Garrison). She demands to chauffeur J.D. around, which he begrudgingly puts up with because Kate, unlike his wife, is hot. 

But also being a blonde — ergo, dumb — Kate falls for the ol’ knock-at-the-door trick, answering it without looking or thinking, despite the ever-present threat of death hanging over them. It’s yet another example of Courier of Death’s misogynist streak, none more repellent than this exchange:

Sexy-ish Woman, I Guess: “Don’t you care to drink with the lady?”
J.D.: “I don’t see one. All I see is a greedy slut!”

Shot in Oregon, Courier of Death feels like an ego vehicle á la GetEven or Kick to Death: Death Kick, except Johnson isn’t the creative force behind the movie. That’d be pornographer Tom Shaw, which explains just about everything. —Rod Lott

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In the opening moments of Gridlock, NYPD super cop Jake Gorsky (David Hasselhoff) foils a hostage situation with little more than a rolled quarter, a janitor’s push broom and a direct threat to a man’s testes. Trouble is, Gorsky’s part of the force’s helicopter unit, so he disobeyed a direct order to let the negotiator do his negotiating. To justify himself, Gorsky argues to his chopper partner that the guy “couldn’t negotiate a hot meal into a starving man!”

What does this have to do with the rest of the made-for-TV movie? Nothing — except to set up that Hasselhoff is basically John McClane (but, of course, isn’t). Gridlock is little more than a third-rate Die Hard clone, with Gorsky cracking wise in the face of danger and woman troubles. Hell, he even goes over the side of a tall building with a firehose tied to his waist.

That building is the Federal Reserve of New York, where his had-it-up-to-here girlfriend (squeaky-voiced supermodel Kathy Ireland) works as a tour guide. Naturally, its gold vault is the target of a team of Euroterrorists in suits and number-based aliases, led by Mr. One (Miguel Fernandes, Ghost Story). From his whirlybird perch in the sky, Gorsky susses out their plan when the bad guys blow up area bridges as distraction. He leaps into action — or as much as an NBC budget will allow — to save his lady and thwart a precious-metals heist.

Much of Gridlock finds Sandor Stern (Amityville: The Evil Escapes) directing Hasselhoff and/or Ireland to walk and/or run down this hallway or that hallway, all while random terrorists shout things like “He’s heading for the coin room!” over walkie-talkies. It’s not as much fun as Terror at London Bridge, arguably the crowning glory of the Hoff’s TV features. But you know what it is more fun than? A Good Day to Die Hard. —Rod Lott

Roughly five minutes after seeing Deep Blue Sea on its opening weekend in the summer of 1999, I couldn’t wait for Renny Harlin to make a sequel. He never did. Deep Water may be as close as we’ll get. At least Aaron Eckhart resembles Thomas Jane enough if you squint, middle-aged dad paunch and all. 

Eckhart (London Has Fallen) and Ben Kingsley (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) are piloting a commercial jet from L.A. to Shanghai with 257 lives aboard. That head count gets slashed by, oh, about 88% when a faulty portable battery sparks a fire in the cargo hold, setting into motion a series of unfortunate events culminating in a devastating crash in the ocean, splitting the aircraft in two (and calling to mind another of Harlin’s greatest action hits: the just-plane-dangerous Die Hard 2).

In the aftermath, first class stays afloat with Eckhart attempting to keep the peace and signal rescue; economy seating is sunk (typical!) with that section’s tail sticking out of the water, creating a pseudo-Poseidon Adventure sitch, which the movie acknowledges with a “Shelley Winters talkin’ shit” joke. But Irwin Allen forgot to surround his oopsie-daisy ship with an untold number of sharks; Harlin has not. 

So we have dual plots at work — twice as many than what most sharksploitation films allow. Although the predators are CGI and the ocean is clearly a set, Harlin is enough of a pro to make many of the attacks at least a tad exciting. Plus, to his credit (or those of the five writers), who gets chewed into chunky bits isn’t always evident. An exception by design is Angus Sampson (Insidious) as the assholiest of asshole passengers whose assholishness causes all the doom and gloom; with this asshole, it’s not a matter of if, but when. 

The disaster sequence itself, at roughly 10 minutes, is really well-done, executed with Final Destination-worthy flair (nice knowing you, Mile-High Clubbers!) that makes you think, “Is it okay I’m laughing here?” That mean streak is not incidental; in fact, I believe co-producer Gene Simmons (yes, as in Kiss) had something to do with its bloody, winking naughtiness.

It’s just a shame that for all its head-chomping and chum-churning, Deep Water pusses out in its coda by going sappy. We’re talking Cancer Kid sappy. It’s so sentimental, they’d probably have Kingsley crooning “Fly Me to Moon,” if the script already hadn’t ordered that twice before. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.