We all owe Timothy Dalton an apology. Turns out he’s quite good in the role of James Bond, even if his first of two shots at bat, The Living Daylights, is not an all-star entry in the 007 franchise.

Befitting of its time — near the end of the Cold War — Daylights pits Bond against the ever-fearsome KGB, but also the ever-formidable Joe Don Baker (Walking Tall) as a gluttonous arms dealer. Honestly, the plot is overwritten with the usual geopolitical brouhaha that could drive you crazy on first viewing, so just worry about following the fun as 007 traipses ’round the world with Kara (Maryam d’Abo, Xtro), a Russian cellist he meets cute when she tries to assassinate the KGB agent Bond helps to defect (Jeroen Krabbé, The Fugitive).

If you’ve ever wanted to see Bond on a roller coaster as part of a carnival date, you’re in luck! This is the one for you. However, coming in at the back end of the ’80s, Daylights feels curiously past its sell-by date, starting with one of the series’ worst theme songs, by a-ha, the Norwegian pop act that already had peaked. Meanwhile, Desmond Llewelyn’s Q demos a literal ghetto blaster in a missile-launching boombox, and a bad guy infiltrates supposedly secure grounds by tossing milk-bottle bombs.

Still, with old pro John Glen (Octopussy) directing the penultimate in his record-setting run of five 007 films, count on action sequences executed with clockwork precision. As good as the scenes are that kick off the plot and then bring it to closure — the latter while hanging out the open cargo bay of an airborne plane — two others are more deserving of mention. The first is the prologue, in which a military paintball exercise suddenly gains life-or-death consequences; the second finds Bond and the bland Kara fleeing pursuers by riding an open cello case down a ski slope. Snow has been exceedingly kind to this franchise, no matter who dons the tux. —Rod Lott

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Confession time: All my life, I never quite understood the appeal of baseball, “America’s pastime.” Then I saw Blood Games. Batter up!

The one and only film from one Tanya Rosenberg, Blood Games begins as Babe and the Batgirls, a traveling all-ladies team, are beating the pants off an unofficial assemblage of backwoods hicks and rednecks. Led by Babe (Laura Albert, The Jigsaw Murders), the Batgirls have been hired to play nine innings against birthday boy Roy (Gregory Scott Cummins, Action U.S.A.) and his greasy, uneducated buds. The girls win, which the guys do not cotton to, so they respond with grab-ass and other on-the-field antics of sexual harassment.

That night, after Roy’s wealthy dad (Ken Carpenter, Tammy and the T-Rex) shortchanges the Batgirls the $1,000 they’re owed, Babe’s father (Ross Hagen, Wonder Women) goes to collect … and a couple of people get killed in the process. Roy’s father places a $1,000 bounty on each Batgirl the boys bring back dead, not alive, so the Batgirls’ bus outta town is thwarted in the middle of the nowhere, leaving every woman for herself. Let the Blood Games begin!

Like Deliverance in hot pants, Blood Games more than satisfies the bloodlust of viewers in the mood for a back-to-basics revenge thriller. Being directed by a woman gives it a more progressive viewpoint while still wallowing in exploitation elements; the movie is a case of having its cheesecake and eating it, too. Beyond Babe and Donna (Lee Benton, Beverly Hills Brats), the Batgirls don’t get much in the way of individual personalities, but the fact that we get any is more or less a plus. With Rosenberg often playing violence in slow motion, her flick rouses as a gem of cathartic VHS trash. As George “Buck” Flower’s character says without an ounce of eloquence, “It was them baseball bitches did it.” Boy, did they ever! —Rod Lott

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The cop killers of Cop Killers number exactly two: Ray and Alex, respectively played by Flesh Gordon himself, Jason Williams, reunited with his producer, Bill Osco. With this pair, coke is it! In fact, the film opens with them closing a $100,000 drug deal when the po-po show up to preempt their celebration. Four dead cops later (hence the title), Ray (the one with the ’stache) and Alex (the one with sideburns the shape of lamb chops) decide to Thelma & Louise their way toward the border of Mexico.

From there, Walter Cichy’s lone directorial effort plays episodic in execution, with the on-the-lam men driving from one situation to another, leaving multiple felonies and misdemeanors in their path. That includes tormenting an effeminate ice cream truck driver (James Nite, in a jaw-dropping performance of ineptitude), forcing a kidnapped blonde (Diane Keller) to read aloud from a trashy paperback novel and making a bloody mess of a convenience store, before finally reaching a hippie den to make a couple of transactions — only one in the financial sense.

Befitting of grindhouse fare, every frame of the independently produced Cop Killers is coated in grit and grime, in part due to its unwashed, grease-caked stars. If it feels like a Bonnie and Clyde riff made by porn producers, that’s because it is. Williams’ inexperience may have worked for the spoofery of Flesh Gordon, but he’s in over his head here; that said, he acts Osco off the screen. The performance most likely to leave your mouth agape can be witnessed — and oh, how it must be — at the hippie den, when a gourd-stoned plaything named Becky (Judy Ross) gives Pespi what would go unchallenged as the company’s most awkward pop-culture moment until 1983, when Michael Jackson’s non-flame-retardant hair knocked it off its perch.

For all of Cop Killers’ rough edges, I found the first half quite enjoyable because the damn thing kept moving forward — not propulsively so, but enough to keep boredom at bay. Then the action pauses for Alex to give their comely captive a step-by-step tutorial on snorting cocaine, and it never recovers, progressively becoming more downbeat. The ending is a foregone conclusion, but gives future multiple Oscar winner Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London) an early chance to develop his makeup-effects muscles. —Rod Lott

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Forty-three years before Captain America and Spider-Man stood on opposing sides in Captain America: Civil War, they did so in 3 Dev Adam (aka Three Giant Men). The former is a billion-dollar blockbuster with enough star power to fuel a thousand suns. The latter is from Turkey. Yet only one opens with Spidey motorboating a woman.

And I don’t mean in the sense of sexual slang, but pushing a motorboat’s whirring engine smack into the face of a distressed damsel buried neck-deep in sand. This Turkish Spider-Man (Tevfik Sen, Yor, the Hunter from the Future) is a real asshole. Captain America (Aytekin Akkaya, another Yor vet) is the good guy.

That’s not the only edge 3 Dev Adam has over the mighty Marvel movie. Far from it. Does Civil War — or any Avengers film — give you:
• Cap joining forces with masked Mexican wrestler Santo (Yavuz Selekman, Tarzan the Mighty Man)?
• Spidey involved in a counterfeit currency scheme?
• Spidey behind the theft of historical artifacts?
• a fashion-show fracas on a yacht?
• Santo pulling guard duty at a post office box?
• a newsboy crying out, “Latest news! Rich woman killed in her bathroom!”?
• Spidey letting hungry mice gnaw on a captive’s face?
• superhero costumes made by a third grader’s stay-at-home mom?
• a frickin’ strip show???

I think not! Keep your Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen. I’ll take Deniz Erkanat and Dogan Tamer. —Rod Lott

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Though usually pretty laid-back, easy rider Peter Fonda jumps into the role of a two-fisted action hero, surprisingly ready to take on a quartet of small-town goons when they try to run from a fender bender in the first few minutes of Fighting Mad.

Directed by future Oscar winner Jonathan Demme for, of course, Roger Corman, here Fonda is farm boy Tom Hunter, returning from the city with his bratty kid after a relatively painful divorce; within minutes of a happy reunion, his brother Charlie (Scott Glenn) is murdered by the aforementioned goons who work for a local land developer.

Taking a page from the book of Brad Wesley, this developer Crabtree (Philip Carey) thinks he owns the town, disinterring an old lady’s makeshift cemetery, causing a rockslide that destroys a family’s home, beating up Hunter’s dear old pop and setting his barn on fire.

At first, Hunter was merely mad — but now he’s fighting mad, hence the title.

Shot and edited in that atmospheric style many of Corman’s New World pics had, Fonda is at his most energetic here, whether he’s running from killers on a dirt bike with his son on his lap or shooting various guards outside of Crabtree’s dwelling with a bow and arrow, delivering a country-fied revenge flick that actually gives us a happy, if mostly nonsensical, ending. —Louis Fowler

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