Deadbeat dad John Saxon plays a bounty hunter in Los Angeles — and not a cool bounty hunter like Boba Fett, but a bounty hunter like … well, like John Saxon. The first loser we see him bust is a large guy with a gay lover who plays the flute while in a Jacuzzi! Later, he accosts another target — a guy named Cookie — in a slaughterhouse, leading to an extended fight using slabs of meat!

But The Glove is really all about Saxon being offered 20 grand to bring in Rosey Grier, who has a penchant for killing prison guards who wronged him, using a riot-gear glove that pounds clean through cement, steel and metal (yet leaves a wicker laundry hamper amazingly unharmed). Despite Grier’s warnings to “step off my set, hound dog,” Saxon needs the dough, vowing to go “sniffing and licking as long as it takes.” Ewww.

It’s hard to like Saxon in many movies beyond Enter the Dragon, because he relies on overplaying the slimy, ain’t-I-smooth-with-the-ladies shtick. And although the teddy-bearish Grier is quite likable, once you’ve seen him sharing an upper torso with Ray Milland, everything else is just scraps.

The directorial debut of Sidehackers actor Ross Hagen (the Saxon of his day), The Glove could use some more glove-on-redneck action, and gets fairly meandering. But it takes itself so seriously — beginning with the opening-credit ode to the glove — it’s occasionally a laugh riot. Like the ending when Saxon’s colleague gets beaten to death with mops, kitchen pans and fists of black vengeance. —Rod Lott

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It may not be as priceless as Eegah!, but The Choppers is another unintentionally hilarious Arch Hall Jr. vehicle worthy of your time and derision.

The whiny Hall stars as “Cruiser,” a teenage punk with sculpted hair and a chassis fetish. He heads a JD gang known as “The Choppers,” whose other members are Torch, Snooper and Flip; all of them talk such thick lingo they should be carrying green cards. When they’re not hanging out at the Chick-A-Dilly, they’re hunched in a poultry truck, waiting for someone to run out of gas along a short stretch of highway, and then move in to strip — or “chop,” as the kids say — the car clean as the driver leaves to fetch fuel. (Apparently, this is an everyday occurrence.)

The Choppers then sell the parts to a fat salvage-yard owner named Moose, whose assistant is a senile fool named Cowboy, who often shoots toward the camera with his finger. If you hadn’t noticed by now, this is the kind of movie where no characters have real names.

The cops are on their trail, however, so for the big stakeout, they invite a local radio reporter to cover it as a live broadcast! It leads to a chase, a game of chicken and ultimately a junkyard shootout that looks choreographed by 8-year-olds.

If you think this story doesn’t allow time for Hall to bust out one of his ridiculous, self-penned songs on the guitar, you’re wrong! Just before the big climax, lil’ Arch takes some time out to sing “Monkey in My Hatband,” the first five lines of which go, “Come, baby / Come on, baby / Come on, baby / Come on, baby / Come on, baby.”

Yep, he wrote that all by his lonesome! —Rod Lott

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Disclaimer: I don’t usually watch cop movies. I find them to be of one extreme or the other. Either the cops are portrayed as noble and by-the-book, even if it means the perpetrators are allowed to go free (which veers so far from reality that you may as well affix the “fantasy” label), or portrayed as so corrupt that the film descends into ridiculousness, like Training Day.

Speaking of Training Day, its screenwriter, David Ayer, is the writer and director of End of Watch, starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko) and Michael Peña (30 Minutes or Less) as two uniformed patrolmen in South Central L.A. The movies have several points in common: the street language, sudden eruption of gut-wrenching violence, and the portrayal of the police as modern-day cowboys attempting to tame an ever-increasing lawless territory.

The heart of the film is the bromance between Gyllenhaal and Peña, partners who aggravate and pick on each other like brothers and, of course, love and trust each other unconditionally. Although the movie periodically strays from gritty realism into Hollywood hyperbole, the chemistry between the two leads sparkle. Both actors shine.

Unfortunately, much like Training Day, the movie lost me during its third act, when it trades realism for the needless and implausible plot development of a Mexican drug cartel putting a hit out on our street-cop protagonists. There are some jarring time jumps that may have you wondering if the story is unfolding in a matter of days, weeks or months. And can we retire the handheld camera mode of storytelling?

Some parts come perilously close to being a recruiting film for the police (much like Top Gun drummed up enlistees for the military), but don’t see it for that or the tacked-on violent climax. See it for the Gyllenhaal and Peña, and some scenes that will make you wish they had never stepped foot out of their squad car. —Slade Grayson

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