Killer Force is a slightly off-kilter heist picture, primarily because of its setting: the middle of a South African desert, with nothing but sand dunes for miles around all sides of the Syndicated Diamond Corporation. Some precious, uncut stones worth $20 million are targeted for thievin’ by a gang of criminals, and they need an inside man to help pull it off. Perhaps even one sleeping with a co-worker’s daughter (Octopussy herself, Maud Adams, never sexier).
That man is Bradley (Peter Fonda, Ghost Rider), SDC’s second-in-command of security. The wisenheimer works under the tyrannical rule of Webb (a truly menacing Telly Savalas, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), who’s such a jerk that it makes Bradley’s decision to aid the dark side that much easier. Whereas director and co-writer Val Guest (The Quatermass Xperiment) depicts that allegiance swing too quickly, it does keep Killer Force moving along — well and consistently, until the mano y mano finale.
I’m uncertain if the title refers to Webb’s bullying, under-my-thumb employment tactics or the dirty quarter-dozen of heist hatchers. It’s led by Simon Cowell look-alike Hugh O’Brian (1965’s Ten Little Indians), clad in manly neckerchief. His mercenary underlings are more notable, in that they’re played by Hammer legend Christopher Lee and double murderer O.J. Simpson. The latter can’t act, but damn, the dude can run! And, a terrific Fonda hero aside, that foot Juice is really all something as compact as this dynamite AIP release needs. —Rod Lott
Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Nay, they should not. After all, it’s tough to rid your mind of people once you’ve witnessed them plummet to their deaths when a luxury ocean liner goes topsy-turvy. Such a fate befalls the revelers ushering in the New Year aboard a top-heavy ship heading from New York to Athens. If it’s not a party until something gets broken, then holy shit, is The Poseidon Adventure ever a blowout!
Shortly after the stroke of midnight, while the adults are still sloshed enough to wear stupid paper hats, a seaquake triggers a giant wave that flips that ship belly-up! Nature’s cruelty personified, the 180˚ turn transforms the opulent ballroom into a collection of broken glass and dead flesh as the passengers are hurled from floor to ceiling. So harsh is the force that Stella Stevens hardly can keep her breasts contained within her gown. And anyone who’s seen her flaunt the goods in films as disparate as The Silencers and Slaughter knows that’s no easy feat. Here, the stacked starlet plays a former hooker now married to the blustery cop who busted her (Ernest Borgnine, 1979’s The Black Hole).
Both are among a handful of survivors who reluctantly follow a faith-challenged man of the cloth (Gene Hackman, The French Connection) up and through a veritable obstacle course to the hull of the upturned Poseidon, in hopes of escape before the boat sinks to join Davy Jones’ locker on the ocean floor. Others on the unscheduled field trip include a one-time swim champion, now overweight (Shelley Winters, The Night of the Hunter); a confirmed bachelor with ginger hair (Red Buttons, When Time Ran Out …); and the groovy lead singer (Carol Lynley of Radley Metzger’s The Cat and the Canary) of the hippie band that plays “The Morning After,” one of the more wretched pop tunes to win the Best Song Oscar. In a story that boldly plays for keeps, not all of them live to see fresh air.
Something of a pet project for producer Irwin Allen (who followed with The Towering Inferno), this adaptation of Paul Gallico’s 1969 novel ditched the rape subplot and, with Ronald Neame (Meteor) at the helm, became a massive hit, kicking off a disaster-movie craze that helped define the decade and kept the Allen household well-fed. Today, The Poseidon Adventure and its brethren get knocked about as witless exercises in largesse — and sure, some are, like the 2006 remake — but, being the granddaddy, this one chooses sobriety over silliness, proving particularly strong in suspense, performances (especially Hackman, giving it his usual all) and special effects. Post-Love Boat, the all-star, kitchen-sink cast began looking unnecessarily bloated, but dammit, that flip-flop sequence has aged wonderfully. —Rod Lott
Literally the last action film of the ’80s, the Guber-Peters Company buddy copper Tango & Cash seemingly rounds up every element that defined the genre that decade, and packed them into the first 10 minutes. To wit: Renegade cops! Guns! Car chases! Cocaine! Tits! Mullets! Mullets!! Mullets!!! Complete and total disregard for life, limb and property! Russian comic relief! The snyth-pop music of Fletch’s Harold Faltermeyer! The scary-potato face of Maniac Cop Robert Z’Dar!
Okay, so I lied. All that can be found in the first nine minutes. Only upon closer scrutiny do we notice the absence of two things: running/jumping from an explosion and a slice of beefcake via a hunk’s bare buns. Rest assured, both “rear” their heads before director Andrei Konchalovsky (Runaway Train) ends the film — in a freeze-frame of a high-five, natch.
Respectively coming off Lock Up and Tequila Sunrise, Stallone and Russell respectively play rival cops Lt. Raymond Tango and Lt. Gabriel Cash, respectively buttoned-up and a loose cannon. Both winners in the war on drugs — or at least as far as their L.A. beats are concerned — the men are framed for murder by rat-loving criminal kingpin Yves Perret (Jack Palance, playing his character as if he were still in Tim Burton’s Batman), simply to move the story forward and give Tango and Cash something to do — namely, go to prison, simply so Tango and Cash can break out of prison. You get the picture; its idea of audience-pleasing comedy is dressing Russell in drag and having Stallone declare that “Rambo is a pussy.” Ha, get it?
At once as familiar and embarrassing as a lunch of SpaghettiOs, Tango & Cash does sport a couple of surprises, the first being that our heroes are like James Bond in that they have their own Q, as savant-as-ever Michael J. Pollard (Bonnie and Clyde) constructs such useful gadgets as the guns that pop out of Cash’s cowboy boot heels. Speaking of 007, future Bond girl Teri Hatcher (Tomorrow Never Dies), in an early role as Tango’s troubled kid sister, Kiki, proves to have quite the impressive stripper moves. She also may be the screen’s only clothes-peeler to a perform a drum solo in the middle of her routine. Well-played, Ms. Hatcher, well-played.
Kiki’s rhyming throwaway comment of “grime, crime and slime” nearly could be Tango & Cash’s plot synopsis, but definitely works as a tagline for this high-calorie high colonic of a movie. Same goes for Tango’s utterance of “good old American action,” because no one makes mindless violence as the USA. USA! USA! USA! US — whaddaya mean Konchalovsky was born in Moscow? No wonder this production was so troubled. —Rod Lott
Look, just because something is old does not make it great. And yet, as the Point Break remake surfed into theaters on Christmas Day 2015, I do not recall running across a single article or review that failed to refer to the 1991 original, which paired Patrick Swayze with Keanu Reeves, as “classic” — noun or adjective. “Classic” is a charged word — one that should be earned rightfully vs. bestowed automatically.
Perhaps Swayze’s too-young passing in 2009 is responsible for the revisionist love, because Kathryn Bigelow’s crime flick was neither well-reviewed nor a hit in its July ’91 bow. In fact, its $8 million opening placed it in fourth that weekend, behind James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood and a reissue of a then-30-year-old cartoon, Disney’s 101 Dalmatians.
So, old? Definitely. Classic? Hardly.
With that out of that way, back to the “new” Point Break …
… and wow, does it suck. Seven years after witnessing (if not encouraging) the death of his dumbass bike-riding buddy (Max Thieriot, House at the End of the Street), extreme-sports athlete Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey, The November Man) has reinvented himself as an FBI agent. When a group of rogue extreme-sports enthusiasts use their extreme-sports skills to pull off a series of extreme heists, Utah is the only one who convincingly can go deep, deep, deep, deep undercover. After all, he’s got the extreme-sports know-how, the sleeve tats and, of utmost importance, the looks of what would result from The Fast and the Furious’ Paul Walker impregnating Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam.
With the bureau’s blessing and armed with gun and surfboard, Utah takes off to infiltrate the gang, crack the case and bring ’em to justice … extreme justice. (Fun fact: According to one of the film’s posters, justice has no limit. Crime doesn’t, either, according to another. #themoreyouknow) Led by the Zen-ful Bodhi (Deliver Us from Evil’s Edgar Ramírez, too good an actor to endure haircuts as super-silly as he does here), the group operates under a Robin Hood agenda of wealth redistribution: Steal from the rich, make it rain on Third World countries. Bodhi’s crew members have names like Roach, Chowder, Grommet and Samsara, and welcome Utah into their bro-dude family with irony-free lines like, “What’s a motocross rider like you doing on a wave like that?” and “The only law that matters is gravity.”
Yes, Point Break is exactly that point-blank simpleminded, and its stupidity exhausts the viewer. Clearly cribbing more from the likes of Furious 7 than Bigelow’s big Break, it boasts some absolutely amazing stunt sequences that impart if not an adrenaline rush, then a solid contact high. Yet not even the best is worth suffering two hours plus of boneheaded dialogue and an unintentionally hilarious bumped-uglies subplot between Utah and eco-friendly earth child Samsara (Warm Bodies’ Teresa Palmer, suffering the further indignity of having her breasts pushed up to her neck). Invincible director Ericson Core (chosen for his extreme name?) is no Bigelow; while he can shoot leaping, jumping, running, falling and other action verbs all day, the man is forever crippled when it comes to mere walking and talking. —Rod Lott
Before hitting it big (and inadvertently buying the farm) with The Crow, Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon, starred in the cheapo actioner Laser Mission, in which he plays American spy Michael Gold. He’s dispatched to encourage defection in Russian professor and laser weaponry expert Braun, played by Escape from New York-er Ernest Borgnine. (Unfortunately, at this point in Oscar winner Borgnine’s storied career, the Hollywood vet was believable only as a consumer of vast quantities of pastrami.)
As Prof. Braun disappears, the glittering Gold gets in deep with the Russian army and finds himself on the run, searching for the educator with the assistance of the prof’s daughter, Alissa, the blonde-haired, helium-voiced and breasts-forever-verging-on-escaping Debi Monahan (Wolfgang Petersen’s Shattered). Together, Michael and Alissa have a chase in a Volkswagen Microbus, shoot countless baddies with dead-on aim and bicker so much that the two are destined to become one (“That’s mister asshole to you!”).
Quite clearly, Lee possessed an easygoing charm that worked for him, although here, he acts largely through his tank top. Monahan has … well, I mentioned them already. For this action film saddled with a science-fiction title, director Beau Davis (Stickfighter) apparently could afford only one song, which they run into the ground: Knopfler’s “Mercenary Man.” (And sorry, but that’s David Knopfler, not Mark, so it’s not Dire Straits so much as just plain dire.) Faults and all, for five-and-10 adventure flicks that populate hundreds of public-domain DVD collections, you can’t do much better than Laser Mission. —Rod Lott
Killer Force is a slightly off-kilter heist picture, primarily because of its setting: the middle of a South African desert, with nothing but sand dunes for miles around all sides of the Syndicated Diamond Corporation. Some precious, uncut stones worth $20 million are targeted for thievin’ by a gang of criminals, and they need an inside man to help pull it off. Perhaps even one sleeping with a co-worker’s daughter (Octopussy herself, Maud Adams, never sexier).
I’m uncertain if the title refers to Webb’s bullying, under-my-thumb employment tactics or the dirty quarter-dozen of heist hatchers. It’s led by Simon Cowell look-alike Hugh O’Brian (1965’s Ten Little Indians), clad in manly neckerchief. His mercenary underlings are more notable, in that they’re played by Hammer legend Christopher Lee and double murderer O.J. Simpson. The latter can’t act, but damn, the dude can run! And, a terrific Fonda hero aside, that foot Juice is really all something as compact as this dynamite AIP release needs. —Rod Lott
