If William Lustig has a B-movie masterpiece, it’s neither Maniac nor Maniac Cop. I nominate his forgotten Hit List, a pulpy crime pic of economical gangster warfare in present-day, not-at-all-confidential L.A. With one of the tallest stacked character-actor casts a limited amount of money can buy, the coastal change does Lustig good.

Aging federal agent Mitchum (Charles Napier, 1997’s Steel) is on his requisite Last Case: babysitting greasy mobster Frank DeSalvo (Leo Rossi, 1981’s Halloween II) under protective custody before testifying in a grand jury against Teflon-coated heroin importer Vic Luca (Rip Torn, A Stranger Is Watching). DeSalvo’s child, Frank Jr., is none too pleased at having to hide at the safe house: “Dad, all dey got is microwave pancakes,” da kid sez like a pint-sized Pesci in training. “But dey ain’t got no microwave.”

Flapjacks excepted, DeSalvo’s biggest worry is the target on his head. See, Luca’s hired someone named Caleek, which sounds like the Wonder Twins’ monkey sidekick, to ice DeSalvo before court. As played by Lance Henriksen in a performance more bonkers than his Stone Cold turn, Caleek is a cat-burglin’ karate-chop assassin so badass, he brazenly drives a van with a “1 KILLR” vanity plate.

Caleek makes a big boo-boo in entering not the safe house, but the one across the street. Thus, unable to locate Frank, he kidnaps who he thinks is Frank Jr., but the child actually belongs to family man Jack Collins (Jan-Michael Vincent, Vigilante Force). In a flash, Collins shifts into Not Without My Alcohol Daughter mode, except with, y’know, a son.

With Collins forcing DeSalvo to join forces to get his kid back, Hit List shifts into a rip-roaring, Rip Torning buddy actioner without even bothering to push the clutch. Their shootout with Luca’s goons within a game of laser tag makes for an ingenious highlight, what with the underaged running around with imaginary zappers.

Video store customers at the time might recall Hit List for its car-crawler cover art, so incredible it practically drove off the rental shelves and into your heart. Unlike so many misleading VHS boxes, the scene shown actually appears in the movie. Lustig not only stages that scene, but showcases as it the climax in a parking garage as Collins attempts to flee Caleek, who climbs all over the moving car like a certain Teutonic cyborg. It’s a stellar action sequence, ending with a sick joke so obvious, yet so, so Lustig. —Rod Lott

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In a right-place/wrong-time scenario, family man and schoolteacher Alex Gainer gets kidnapped by an enigmatic tech company secretly developing a super-soldier serum. After injecting illegals in this clandestine experiment, the firm moves to perfect physical specimens like Gainer, seeing how he’s portrayed by British kickboxer and American straight-to-video action hero Gary Daniels.

Gainer has everything to lose, so when he’s framed as a cop killer, he’s willing to do anything to avoid capture and clear his name, like:
• steal an 18-wheeler to penetrate a police barricade
• then steal a school bus as a follow-up
• fight an S&M-practicing couple in their own kitchen
• scale a skyscraper while being shot at from a helicopter
• trust a TV journalist (Kenneth Tigar, Phantasm II) whose camerawoman (Jillian McWhirter, Strangeland) wears a vest that might be a Pizza Hut tablecloth

Rage isn’t content with stopping there. Perhaps out-Commandoing Commando, the climax’s all-out brawl takes place in a multilevel shopping mall with many, many plate-glass windows for Gainer and his pursuers to bust through — some in glorious slow motion. No freestanding table or merry-go-round in the place is spared, nor are the VHS shelves of the video rental store offering only PM Entertainment titles, like Zero Tolerance and C.I.A. Code Name: Alexa.

Naturally, Rage not only was built at the PM Entertainment action factory, but more than competently directed by PM co-founder Joseph Merhi. In its decade of pumping these scuffles-and-’splosions pics out for Friday-night Cinemax premieres, his production company caught flak as a purveyor of schlock, but that reputation wasn’t always warranted, with Rage serving as proof. Presumably, its price tag came in below seven figures, yet the movie doesn’t act like it; with actual scope and scale, Rage is barely discernible from lower-tier wide theatrical releases that year — I speak of Fair Game, Top Dog and The Hunted. The one glaring exception: the lack of a household name.

Not that Daniels didn’t try! Like many of his co-stars in The Expendables, where he played the antagonist, he may not have razor-sharp thespian skills, but he’s got something. In Rage, that’s apparent right away — not in a kablooey set piece, but in teaching second graders about monkeys, even if it takes a dark turn into Jeffrey Dahmer’s dietary choices. —Rod Lott

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Not based on the action-film character from The Simpsons, this McBain is based on the action-film character by James Glickenhaus, director of The Exterminator. And who plays this rousing actor hero? You must’ve said Robert Ginty, right?

But instead, we have an out-of-it, out-of-his-element Christopher Walken, well before he become a walking internet meme in regular, off-kilter movies.

In 1973, in the jungles of the Philippines Vietnam, the U.S. is withdrawing her troops. Michael Ironside, Steve James and Chick Vennera are on the plane ride home, but first, they find a P.O.W. camp they have to liberate. It looks like the set of Cannibal Holocaust. There, Walken is in a fight with a lookalike Bolo Young. Of course, the battle is won. But, should they we need each other, Walken and Vennera have a bond with a tattered $100 bill if things go bad.

Eighteen years later, things go bad.

Vennera is a freedom fighter for the Filipino Colombian government. Although he takes el Presidente hostage, he is killed by his own gun in a reversal of fortune. With Vennera’s sister (Maria Conchita Alonso), Walken (supposedly) walks all the way to New York City, has a beer and reunites with members of his old platoon, now leading very different lives, all of them dumb.

To get to the Philippines Colombia, they have bloody fights with drug dealers and mafia goombahs in order to get enough money to charter a plane. This takes up most of the movie’s 104-minute runtime. On arrival, Alonso and her freedom fighters take the presidential palace, and Walken shoots el Presidente in the head, with thumbs up all around in jingoistic support.

With songs that are overwrought hymns to America (“This my song for freedom!”) alongside the bloodiest gun battles in the early ’90s, this is a strange film that manages to be very boring. Although Glickenhaus caught lightning in a bottle with The Exterminator, apparently the bottle shattered on the ground with films like The Protector and Shakedown.

Plodding with its bad editing, weird time lapses and strange motivations, this movie is just pretty bad. No wonder it has been mostly forgotten, especially with cast members like Walken or Ironside, who are usually able to discern when bad trash is good trash. With McBain, it’s bad trash all the way around. —Louis Fowler

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You can’t miss Treat Williams in Night of the Sharks. He’s the one wearing minimally buttoned Hawaiian shirts and a baseball cap emblazoned with a big, red “S” — which, it goes without saying, stands for “Shit, what did my agent get me into?” (Oh, just an Italian B movie to keep your tummy full before your mid-1990s comeback, Treat.)

Williams’ fisherman character, David Ziegler, lives the hammock-and-shack life on the Caribbean shore, complete with a bolo-wearing sidekick (Foxy Brown’s brother, Antonio Fargas). The plot ostensibly concerns Ziegler fighting for his life when his dumb brother sends him a CD encoded with all the secrets of a criminal overlord (John Steiner, Caligula) that many a goon will kill to keep. But director Tonino Ricci is no dummy (despite Thor the Conqueror’s evidence to the contrary); ergo, his movie is titled Night of the Sharks, not Disc of Incriminating Data.

Sharks do appear, although mostly in sunlight. In fact, a particular shark pesters Ziegler daily, not unlike an unchained Doberman on a USPS mail carrier’s route. It swims in shallow water around Ziegler’s boat; Ziegler shouts it’s a “son of a bitch”; the shark shouts back. From shot to shot and scene to scene, however, its fin changes shape. In close-up, it’s toothless. Not that you’ll mind.

Perhaps sensing Dead Heat was going to tank, Williams gobbled up an easy paycheck in semi-paradise, whether you consider that to be the Dominican Republic or in bed with Janet Agren (City of the Living Dead) as his still-hot-to-trot ex-wife. (It’s certainly not listening to the cancer-ravaged voice of Christopher Connelly, playing a priest in his final role.)

Sharksploitation pics often don’t climax in an all-out jungle war, but that just makes this junk that much more fun. They also often don’t contain genuine star wattage like Williams, who, ever the professional, appears to have taken this as seriously as his 1970s’ lead roles. Yes, even when he’s arguing with a shark — which, it goes without saying, ain’t the stuff of Sidney Lumet. —Rod Lott

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Of the many Smokey and the [Insert Noun Here] movies that followed Burt Reynolds’ Bandit box-office bonanza, Smokey & the Judge is arguably the most obscure. Oddly, it’s the only one that stars a music group with a Billboard hit: Hot, the R&B trio of Gwen Owens, Cathy Carson and Juanita Curiel.

Yeah, I hadn’t heard of them, either.

At any rate, their one and only movie (aka Makin’ It, Runnin’ Hot and Strong Together) follows the three ladies of Hot as they pursue chart stardom. Margo (Owens) and Carol (Carson) just have to get out of prison first. While behind bars, Carol responds to a computer dating ad by giving answers like “peanut butter underwear.” This matches her with Morris Levy (Darrow Igus, John Carpenter’s The Fog), who happens to be a talent manager and promises them an L.A. recording contract.

Once they’re out and joined by Carol’s pal Maria (Curiel), Morris books them into a dumpy bar where a construction worker in a hard hat brings his beer-drinking pet snake. With great voices to make up for no personalities, the girls are a hit with the crowd! If only they can keep from running afoul of the redneck sheriff (Gene Price), the corpulent judge (Joe Marmo, American Drive-In), their bitchy parole officer (A’leshia Brevard, TV’s Legend of the Superheroes) and other miscreants, they may just make it after all.

So much for story! The running time is padded with half a dozen more-than-competent song performances, plus weak car chases, a Volkswagen Bus explosion, a biplane explosion, non-exploding motorcycles, gas siphoning, dog pissing, hot pants wearing, Harper Valley P.T.A.-ready sex pranks and one aggressive act of pouring ketchup down the crotch of Hack-O-Lantern’s repellent Hy Pyke.

Just as Hot was a one-hit wonder (“Angel in Your Arms”), Smokey & the Judge is Dan Seeger’s only movie as director. Having edited Al Adamson’s Death Dimension, he’s as terrible behind the camera as you’d think. Although some of the jail scenes are shot in a genuine clinker, others clearly were done in an apartment, complete with a “NO TOUCHING” sign Sharpie’d by hand. None of this amounts to a recommendation, not even for nondiscerning hicksploitation fans. —Rod Lott

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