Imagine Speed with a lazy mechanic in place of a mad bomber, and congrats! You’ve got yourself a pretty good grasp of what the made-for-TV movie Runaway Car is all about.

As nurse-in-training Jenny, Nina Siemaszko (Airheads) takes over the spunky Sandra Bullock role when her clunker of a Sedan — fresh from a half-assed lube — won’t quit accelerating as it glides down the highway. Beverly Hills Cop sidekick Judge Reinhold is Ed, the simpering computer nerd of a passenger, to whom Jenny has offered a ride. Children are put into mortal danger and Jenny even has to deal with a section of missing road.

For all its cinematic theft, Runaway Car is damned entertaining. More telefilms should be like this, and being steered by Jack Sholder (The Hidden) sure helps. See if you don’t feel a slight case of frazzled nerves as they try to remove an infant from the titular vehicle by hooking the tot to a rope dangling from a news helicopter! And then try not to laugh when said chopper nearly swings the baby into a highway overpass! By balancing dangerous situations with altogether ridiculous ones, this Fox network flick keeps your interest cruisin’ right along. —Rod Lott

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As Col. John Hogan barks to his recruits, “I ain’t the Army, ain’t the Navy, ain’t the Marine Corps! … I’m meaner than all of ’em!” While that is debatable, it is clear he is training the men to be the highest-paid mercenaries in the people-killing field. Hogan’s methods — effective, yet unorthodox — go something like this:
1. Abduct guys off the streets.
2. Drive them to the base, some 75 miles outside Los Angeles.
3. Steal their shoes.
4. Make them literally run for their lives into the woods.
5. Give chase and shoot freely until the poor saps are dead.

Footing the bill for this Most Dangerous Game is a steely-eyed suit (Troy Donahue, The Phantom Gunslinger) who shows up to deliver Hogan a one-month-or-else ultimatum: “Get this bunch of misfit mercenaries ready for action.” Perhaps so desperate as to be sloppy, the Hogan Squad kidnaps the wrong guy to become the latest Deadly Prey: Vietnam vet Mike Danton (Ted Prior, Sledgehammer), he of the big pecs and bigger blonde poodle mullet.

Shirtless and in cutoffs, Danton looks like Magic Mike meets M*A*S*H. Almost just as quickly as he’s given a running head start, our himbo hero turns the tables on Hogan’s zeroes. Camouflaging himself with a twig and a handful of brush, Danton aims to beat his captors on their home turf by Rambo-ing some shit up. An awful lot of bodies hit the floor before one of the gunmen notices: “Christ, we’re not huntin’ him! He’s huntin’ us!” Later surveying the swift reduction of his workforce with his own eyes triggers a tinge of recognition in Col. Hogan (David Campbell, Twisted Justice) …

Hogan: “This style! I know this style! It’s my style! … Danton? Mike Danton?”
Random Armed Lackey in Sunglasses: “Yeah, that was the name on the mailbox. You know him?”
Hogan: “Know him? I trained him.”

If I had written and directed this, I would have instructed Campbell to face the camera on those last three words as I zoomed in, all tight and dramatic and prepping my DGA acceptance speech.

But I didn’t; David A. Prior (Killer Workout) did. He may have missed that golden opportunity, but give the man this: Deadly Prey is nothing if not action-packed and then vacuum-sealed, so as not to let a single drop of testosterone leak out. It’s never boring.

Supposed grenades explode with all the impact of whatever a magician throws to the ground to create an instant smoke screen, but give the man this: He shoehorned in a meaningless role for B-movie legend Cameron Mitchell (Kill Squad), so your grandpa would have reason to rent the tape.

And Prior ends his movie abruptly, with highly questionable closure that left the plot open for his overdue sequel in 2013’s Deadliest Prey, but give the man this: He defied the odds and did what they said couldn’t be done. In essence, he filmed the unfilmable: the Cabela’s catalog. —Rod Lott

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For City on Fire, Canada took The Towering Inferno, knocked it on its side, reduced its running time by an hour, then plucked a few supporting players from The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and The Swarm. Ta-dah! Instant disaster movie! (Half a decade too late to capitalize on the craze, but still: “A” for effort.)

Directed by Death Ship cap’n Alvin Rakoff, the fiery film quickly introduces the characters we theoretically are supposed to care about — a tall order when one of them is Shelley Winters. We have a fire chief two months from retirement (Henry Fonda, Meteor), a vodka-pickled newswoman (Ava Gardner, 1977’s The Sentinel), a wealthy widow who donated $3 million for the new downtown hospital (Susan Clark, Porky’s), that hospital’s numero uno surgeon (Barry Newman, Vanishing Point) and the city’s corrupt mayor (Leslie Nielsen, in his creepy Creepshow mode) with eyes on being governor and being atop Clark’s character.

Meanwhile, over at the world’s ninth-largest oil refinery — which the mayor allowed to be built right next to waterways, all the better to Irwin Allen this here shit up — a beady-eyed, longtime maintenance worker named, of course, Herman (Jonathan Welsh, Starship Invasions) is shown the door and retaliates by punching timecards that aren’t his and causing a big explosion. And that big explosion results in more big explosions. And those big explosions travel down that flammable river like one long wick and set off even bigger explosions, all over town! Why, one might go so far as to say the city is on fire.

Indeed it is, all to show that the film’s appetizer sequence of an apartment building going up in flames — thanks to some pesky kids trying to smoke cigs — was like an hour of TV’s Emergency! by comparison. Please note there is nothing wrong with Emergency!, but is there an episode where a VW Bug flips in the air from the sheer force of a kablooey? Where quake-style rumbling causes some old dude to fall into a swimming pool? Where walls collapse around some poor young guy just trying to get in some reading while taking a dump? Where a Hollywood legend like Gardner says “fuck”? Hell, did Julie London ever go the extra mile like Clark, and give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a stranger whose face is caked with yellow vomit?

Look, Rakoff may have had to resort to the ol’ shake-the-camera trick and leaned too hard on one terrible matte painting, but cut him some serious slack: He shows a crazy woman from the hospital purposely walk toward the raging fires, seemingly oblivious that the skin on her face is peeling like an onion. Hell, Rakoff’s concluding set piece puts Nielsen in control of a fire hose, and he turns the throng of exiting patients into his own personal wet T-shirt contest! Something tells me Emergency! creator/producer/goody-two-shoes Jack Webb wouldn’t go for those shenanigans.

But I sure as hell did. City on Fire earns its R rating, because it wanted to. It’s surprisingly gory and, therefore, surprisingly good. Not even Fonda’s ending sermon could temper my enthusiasm. —Rod Lott

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Moments after attempting to seduce his sexy wife (Cherilyn Basile) with hot talk of their booming electronics company’s quarterly earnings, Joseph Lawrence (Jeff Risk, an apt surname for this tyro) is shocked to find himself cock-blocked. Thugs led by Dutch (Cameron Mitchell, Gorilla at Large) break into the Lawrences’ living room, rape and murder the missus, yet leave Joseph merely confined to a wheelchair for life (and his voice dubbed by Russell Johnson, the Professor of Gilligan’s Island!), all because the couple wouldn’t sell!

Upon release from the hospital, Joseph calls upon his Vietnam vet pal, Larry (The Enforcer’s Jean Glaudé), he of the Fisher-Price Afro, for assistance. From his beloved rose garden, Joseph lets his vengeance-dripping wishes be known: “Fragrance opens a man’s mind,” he says. “I want you to assemble a squad.”

A Kill Squad, dammit!

With writer/director Patrick G. Donahue (Troma’s They Call Me Macho Woman!) sparing viewers no detail, Larry goes about recruiting a Village People-esque Rainbow Coalition of revenge: a Gold’s Gym ‘roided honky, a black cowboy, an Asian gardener, a Hispanic construction worker, a Jewish businessman in the insect trade — ‘Nam buddies one and all. We meet each prospective squad member as he happens to kung-fu several dudes at once for some flimsy disagreement or another; as the fight concludes, Larry and the others (increasing in number at each stop, like The Little Rascals used to do) just walk up and say, “Joseph needs you,” and boom — the Kill Squad is complete, no questions asked. Instead of group health insurance, they get matching camo uniforms. To up the intimidation factor, they know simple math; as the movie’s tagline has it, “12 Hands … 12 Feet … 24 Reasons to Die!”

From there, Kill Squad enters its second cycle of agonizing repetition — one that carries the actioner through the back half. Donahue’s chockablock formula goes like this: The members approach a(n) [insert one item from Column A] and say, “We’re looking for a man named [insert one item from Column B],” and then a fight breaks out, as does a jazz-funk theme heavy on that plunky Seinfeld bass, ending with a squad member getting [insert one item from Column C] by a mysterious man in Diabolik black. Repeat until only one man survives!

Imagine if The Expendables were truly expendable and not at all famous (most of these guys never acted before or after), and that’s Kill Squad. It’s like Agatha Christie’s First Blood, but also M. Night Shyamalan’s Fists of Fury, because a Big Twist awaits … that you can see coming from the clichéd mile away. However, that’s exactly the kind of thing you want from a no-name VHS action flick with delusional intentions. You’ll love it! —Rod Lott

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Bold admission: I’ll watch almost anything that dares to put an exclamation point in its title, including Hijack! (Exclamation theirs.) But since nothing in this Spelling-Goldberg telefilm gets hijacked, I propose that it should be called Hijack? (Question mark mine.)

TV’s original Fugitive, David Janssen, is Jake Wilkenson, a gruff, tanned, middle-aged truck driver on suspension, hired to drive a top-secret government project from Las Vegas to Houston. Sounds easy, right?

Well, unfortunately, blobby, lisping Donny McDonald (Keenan Wynn, Dr. Strangelove) is his co-driver. Ha! I kid, because the real trouble comes in the form of a bald guy in loud pants who chases and attempts to kill them, over and over (per the orders of The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart director Leonard Horn), until Jake gets the bright idea to ram their helicopter with his semi.

See? Not a damn thing hijacked, except 74 minutes of your free time. —Rod Lott

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