Ringo Lam (City on Fire) brought his might as one of Hong Kong’s most noted action directors to the West for Maximum Risk, the first of three assignments starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Said Muscles from Brussels plays the cop Alain Moreau, twin brother of Mikhail, the guy who’s killed in the kick-ass prologue. (And before we proceed, with this, Double Impact and Replicant, just how many double-trouble movies does Van Damme intend to make?)

To find out — about his sib’s death, not the number of twin movies — Alain travels from France to New York, where he enlists the help of a possibly autistic cabbie (Zach Grenier, TV’s Deadwood) who’s writing the Great American Novel. Everywhere he goes, Alain is mistaken as his brother, a “big-time gangster” who evidently betrayed the Russian mob.

Even club hostess and former stripper Alex (Natasha Henstridge) assumes he’s Mikhail, and thus, throws herself at him because she’s the dead dude’s GF. Alain, however, backs off from her advances, which is how you know this is not based on a true story. Later, however, after he spots a peek at her fabulously real breasts while she changes clothes, Alain’s into the idea of letting her rub her Species DNA all over his parts, and allows it.

But this is an action movie, and generic though much of may be, Maximum Risk does deliver in that department, with Lam excelling at staging the car chases more than the gunplay. As so many of these flicks tend to do for no discernible reason, its climax is set amid hanging animal carcasses. I’m a bit surprised Van Damme was willing to share the screen with another slab of meat. —Rod Lott

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There are two kinds of Chuck Norris films. The first create a decent enough entertainment around His Holy Beardness by surrounding him with actors capable enough to distract the audience from the immovable post that is Grimace Highkicky, such as Code of Silence or Lone Wolf McQuade. The other kind allows Fisty Hardcheese to carry the heft of the film on his own charisma, leading us down a jagged path of despair to Hero and the Terror and The Hitman.

I’ve never seen the original Delta Force, but considering its cast includes George Kennedy (!), Robert Vaughn (!!), Robert Forster (!!!) and Lee Fuckin’ Marvin (!!!!!), I figure it must, at its worst, be an enjoyable shoot-’em-up. By comparison, Delta Force 2 has Billy Drago annnnddd … that’s it. Give Drago some credit: His performance as a drug lord is so ridiculously oily, he becomes not only the highlight of the film, but the only reason to see it.

Directed by Aaron Norris (favorite bro of Bristle McSoloflex, and as fine a director as his sib is an actor), Delta Force 2 finds Punch Rockgroin leading some kind of anti-terrorist group, a leader so magnetic that no backstory or character development is necessary. After a friend is killed by Drago, The Beard with No Name works out his rage by kicking the snot out of his men in a training exercise and then traveling to South America for revenge, backed by the U.S. government.

Much poorly choreographed shooting and roundhouse kicking follows. If nothing else, Delta Force 2 serves as a primer for right-wing darling McFootinyourface’s nuanced understanding of U.S. foreign policy.

Fun fact: Chuck Norris is the only man alive with less facial expressions than Steven Seagal. —Corey Redekop

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It may have a Playboy Playmate in the lead, but Andy Sidaris’ Stacey is the most un-Sidaris movie Sidaris ever made (documentary The Racing Scene excepted). No matter. It’s still a damn good time. Anne Randall portrays Stacey, “the centerfold private eye,” and she’s actually a better actress than one usually finds in Sidaris movies, exuding a real wholesome, Heather Graham quality. As the film begins, she tells us she “just finished a case involving a pet chimpanzee and a talking parrot. The chimp was a slob and the bird knew too much. The maid shot them both.” Whatever that means.

Stacey is hired by a rich, old bat in Bel Air who is confined to a wheelchair, on which hangs a bullhorn so she can yell for people to push her. The woman wants Stacey to find out exactly who’s who and what’s what among her family members so she’ll know to whom she should leave her inheritance.

It doesn’t take long for Stacey to find out the chauffeur is banging the whoreish wife and trying to blackmail her with pictures of their trysts. The real mystery comes when the chauffeur is stabbed to death, but Stacey — whether she’s wearing blouses, bikinis or bare breasts — is on the case, lugging her pilot boyfriend around as she investigates. After barely escaping death a second time in one day, he finally asks her calmly, “Stace, will you tell me what that was all about?”

The action centerpiece is a bloody shootout in the parking lot of a speedway (where nary a bystander even bats an eye), soon leading to two goons in a helicopter chasing Stacey in a borrowed race car down the coastline highway. This being a Sidaris film, there’s plenty of action in the bedroom, too, and Randall is quite the hottie. Hell, even with the huge hair and the ugliest of ’70s outfits, she’s still a hottie. I also didn’t mind her T-shirt, which reads “FONDLE WITH CARE,” too. —Rod Lott

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Today, Steven Paul is best known (if at all) as the guy who keeps Jon Voight working in such modern crapsterpieces as Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Karate Dog and Bratz, but back in 1986, he was busy trying to live down the failure of his infamous 1982 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation, Slapstick (of Another Kind), which likely will go down in history as the worst movie ever made based on a book by a modern literary master.

Apparently, Hollywood decided four years was long enough to leave him dangling before allowing him to co-write and produce Never Too Young to Die, a strange attempt to create a new action franchise that tried to fuse the retro campiness of ’60s secret agent movies with the gender-bending campiness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Future Full House icon John Stamos plays Lance Stargrove the (teenage?) son of American secret agent Drew Stargrove (George Lazenby, who presumably got the part because Roger Moore read it and told Paul and company to go fuck themselves), who’s killed attempting to stop an evil scheme to turn the nation’s drinking water into radioactive sludge by a hermaphroditic maniac named Velvet Von Ragner (Gene Simmons, summoning the collective spirits of John LaZar and Tim Curry). Lance is aided in his mission to avenge his father’s death by his glamorous partner Danja Deering (ex-Prince associate and Tanya’s Island star Vanity, who isn’t quite hot enough to make up for the fact that she’s one of the worst actresses of all time) and his (boarding school/college?) roommate Cliff (Peter Kwong), an Asian gadget genius.

Directed by TV vet Gil Bettman, Never Too Young to Die clearly was meant to stand out from the ’80s action crowd, but its overt attempts at over-the-top campiness only serve to highlight how boring and generally crappy the rest of the film is. Simmons obviously had a fun time playing his version of an Adam West Batman villain, but his giddiness only serves to prove how bland Stamos and Vanity are in comparison. Because of this, the implied sequels never happened and the chances of Stamos ever appearing in an Expendables entry turned to naught. Somehow, however, Paul managed to keep on working, if only to give his friend, Voight — who gets a songwriting credit (!) in this flick — a much-needed paycheck every now and then. —Allan Mott

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Long after the Incredible Hulk television series had ended, NBC revived the Hulk with a string of comparably silly made-for-TV movies, the first of which was, naturally, The Incredible Hulk Returns. Still a lonely soul, Bruce Banner (Bill Bixby) is on the verge of finishing a project that he believes will cure him of his unfortunate Hulk-outs. But just when he’s about to fire up the machine and change his life for the better, he’s interrupted by some curly haired nerd from his past, who tells him of a polar expedition he recently undertook, where he found an ancient hammer that allows him to summon Thor (Eric Kramer). Got that?

Why would this dork think to track down the presumed-dead Banner to tell him all this? Never you mind, because he shows Banner a demo, and sure enough, here comes Thor (looking less like Thor than Vincent D’Onofrio’s car mechanic in Adventures in Babysitting), who proceeds the wreck the shit outta Banner’s anti-Hulk contraption. Oh, the irony!

Thor doesn’t even really act like the Thor of the comics. He acts like Fabio after a week’s training of Hooked on Phonics. Posing and winking like a pro wrestler, he walks around shirtless, downs gallons and gallons of beer, and greets visitors to Banner’s apartment by asking, “Why must you pound on my door with such insolence?” This is where you know director Nicholas Corea wanted to hit the button on the mixing console marked “LAFF TRACK.”

It just sorta ends after the climactic scene of the Hulk (Lou Ferrigno) and Thor working together to pull down a helicopter. Then Banner hits the road again, only to resurface in the following year’s misleadingly titled The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. —Rod Lott

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