The Commies are bad, mmmkay.

The other great theme of eighties US action cinema- after the cancer of urban decay- was the fight against global Communism. Rambo led the charge when he liberated Afghanistan. Red Scorpion is Dolph Lundgren’s entry into the genre. He wants you to know that there were decent Russians out there- they were just too naive or brainwashed to recognise the evil that their leaders did. All they needed was to have their eyes opened, probably violently.

Nikolai is that naive, brainwashed Russkie, a spetsnatz specialist called in to infiltrate a rebel group in a made up African country ruled, by proxy, by Russia. He’s big and dumb, if resourceful, and it takes a long time for him to realise the oppressors aren’t the barely organised resistance but the Soviet “advisers” and their Cuban puppets. He has to get beaten, betrayed, tortured and taken on an over-long vision quest before he fully understands this, but when he does blood flows and bullets fly.

There’s only one American character in the whole film- M. Emmett Walsh playing a pugnacious little reporter, recording Soviet atrocities on his big tape recorder. The rest of the cast play Africans, Russians or Cubans. This could have been a brave move in a film primarily for an American audience, but was probably its own piece of propaganda. The USA doesn’t interfere in other countries (and hopefully the viewers are naive and brainwashed enough to believe this).

Apart from its No Yanks policy and some good looking scenery, there’s not a lot to distinguish this film. None of the set pieces is outstanding or inventive. And they destroy a lot of Land Rovers, which is a sin. It fills a gap in your action film collection, but it’s nothing special.

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Takuma Tsurugi is a karate fist for hire with flexible morals. In the opening sequence of the film, he rescues a condemned martial artist from the scaffold, but when the fighter’s siblings can’t cough up their fee Tsurugi kills the brother and sells the sister into prostitution.

But Tsurugi has some lines he won’t cross. When a prospective job means working for the mafia he refuses, and becomes a marked man. Insulted by an attempt to kill him, Takuma decides to protect the billionaire’s daughter he had been expected to kidnap. This puts him at odds with a Hong Kong based mercenary crew, the members of which wouldn’t be out of place in Streetfighter the game. (One of them, in a clear nod to Zatoichi, is a blind swordsman, another a knife wielding crazy with painted on cheekbones. They all wear ostentatious outfits from another era.) After rescuing and then losing the heiress a couple of times, it all comes full circle for the final showdown.

This isn’t graceful martial arts. It’s all bone-crunching punches, kicks and barges, often in confined spaces, with interesting camera angles and a fair amount of fake blood. A signature Tsurugi move is to tear chunks of flesh from his opponents bodies. Most often it’s the throat that suffers, but in one memorable finishing move it’s the tackle of a would-be rapist that becomes a squelchy mess.

Chiba doesn’t play his character as invincible. You know he can easily pulverise most of the goons that come after him, but there are moments of vulnerability, most obviously when the martial arts teacher who may have known Tsurugi’s father demonstrates his superior technique.

Logic and character motivation- particularly that of the Hong Kong leader- go out of the window in the last scene, but that is the way of most action movies, particularly in this genre. All in all, this is a respectable addition to the martial arts canon.

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Another entry in the “urban America is hell” genre of 1980’s movies.

The film opens with an explosion and a high fall, as more movies should. We’re in Vietnam, and a couple of Rangers- Mike and John- are in deep shit after being caught by the Cong. After seeing another soldier beheaded Mike makes use of a cleverly hidden garotte to rescue John, who’s tied to stakes and next in line for decapitation.

Fast forward a few years and Mike and John are working in a food warehouse in New York city. John’s still twitchy and haunted by his war, but Mike’s a happy family man still capable of laying down a beating if necessary. Mixing it up with a gang called the Ghetto Ghouls, however, sees Mike beaten and paralysed and sets John off on a revenge spree.

Exterminator is different from other 80s action films, and in many ways more realistic. Robert Ginty, as John the Exterminator, is not the tough, unbeatable type. He’s vulnerable, occasionally even seeming terrified by what he’s got himself into. But once he’s started, he knows there’s no clean and easy way out, so he keeps on with his one man war on crime.

The Exterminator has his military training, and access to M16s and other Army kit, but he’s no tactical mastermind. The criminals he takes down, with the exception of the meat-packing districts main mobster, are targets of opportunity rather than part of a plan. The action all takes place at a believable level. This is probably a result of the limited budget the film had, and it works very well.

New York is a horrible, dangerous place in this film. The Bronx looks like it’s been bombed and Times Square is a seedy space full of porn and prostitutes under all the neon. The Exterminator moves between these apocalyptic spaces, almost guided by Brownian motion to find chicken pimps and perverse senators, scarred prostitutes and drugged out thugs until it all comes full circle and he has a final showdown with the Ghetto Ghouls.

There’s a cop on John’s tail, but he seems to spend more of his time starting a relationship with Mike’s doctor than trying to catch the Exterminator. The press and public love the vigilante, the Police department is ambivalent and the CIA have their own politically driven reasons to see him eliminated. Cop, killer and spooks eventually meet in a midnight rendezvous on the docks and it ends the only way it can.

This is a neat little film. Gruesome, for its time, and a scary representation of how grim some folks felt the world was in the eighties, it’s human scale and realistic nastiness make it a good counterpoint to the overblown outings of Stallone and Schwarzenneger.

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Breaker 1 9. Breaker 1 9.

I’m not sure if Redneck Hollywood is as deserving of a documentary as Australian or Phillipine exploitation cinema, but I’m sure it was a thing. From Deliverance to Smokey and the Bandit (the whole of Burt Reynolds’ career, in fact) and The Dukes of Hazzard, the southern states had a fair representation. Add Convoy to the list.

Convoy is a Sam Peckinpah film. This meant very little to me when I saw it as a ten year old, but I can see similarities to some of his Westerns now. It’s a PG, so there’s none of the blood of The Wild Bunch, but there are the sun-bleached vistas and the dust. The truckers are latter-day cowboys- tough men and women doing a hard job that few others want to- or can- do. It’s a lonesome existence, with comradeship based upon shared experience and snatched chances for love (or, more often, sex).

And then there’s The Man, always trying to punish them for just getting by the only way they know how. In Convoy, The Man is Lyle ‘Cottonmouth’ Wallace, played by Ernest Borgnine. Lyle’s a self important sheriff with a bad attitude toward truckers and a dubious line in CB based entrapment. After one run in too many with the corrupt cop a bunch of truckers, led by ‘Rubber Duck’, beat up Wallace and a bunch of his deputies then make a run for the state line. They pick up fellow travellers along the way and six trucks become a mile long convoy with popular support and overtures from politicians.

The problem is, it’s never made clear just what it is that the truckers want, apart from away from Lyle. With their disparate complaints and lack of coherent demands it’s like they’re Occupy the Interstate. The film, and the Duck, is saved from having to address this by the need to rescue a fellow trucker from a rotten border town and then escape to Mexico.

The final showdown on a bridge features more than enough bullets for a Peckinpah flick, and a big explosion to make up for the lack of blood. The Duck is a martyr to whatever it was he stood for, only to have his memory hijacked by a senator up for re-election.

Convoy was based upon a novelty hit song and cashed in on the CB craze, but it managed to squeeze some anti-establishment, pro working man propaganda into the mix.

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The ’80s were hell.

There’s something simultaneously entertaining and embarassing about action films from the early to mid eighties. The blatant Right wing propaganda is laughable, until you realise that its simplistic worldview has migrated from the screen and is now the manifesto for far too many politicians in the USA. Fat white men think that because they can legally own a gun they’re as tough as Cobra and need to trash talk anyone who dares suggest they’re part of the problem.

The behaviour of the average Reagan era action movie hero was so sadistic and psychotic that the villains they fought had to be paper thin cartoon caricatures of pure evil if our sympathies weren’t to wander. In Cobra, the antagonists are a biker gang rampaging through LA, killing “the weak” so they can prepare humanity for the coming storm. This horrific Hell’s Angel/hippy/Commie group are led by a blank-faced, heavy browed thug with a messiah complex and a squeeze in the Police department.

Sylvester Stallone, on the other side, is Marion “Cobra” Cobretti, a member of the “Zombie Squad”. He’s the one they call when random bad guys need to be gunned down and not-so-pithy one liners mumbled, but they won’t let him work any proper cases- like the mysterious “Night Slasher” who’s killing folks all around town. But Marion gets his chance when a model called Ingrid unknowingly witnesses one of the killings and is marked for death herself.

Then it’s just a case of working through the shoot-outs, car chases, shooty car chases and final showdown in a factory that seems to exist to bottle flames (the fire storage business was quite big in 1980’s California, if these films are to be believed). All the time, the pencil-pushing, by-the-book know nothings that make up the rest of the Police department keep telling Cobra that he’s off the case but never actually pull him, which is a bonus for Brigitte Nielsen’s character when all of the state’s bad apple bikers turn up at her safe house.

This is a rather nondescript little movie in action film terms, with nothing distinctive about it except for Cobretti’s custom 1950 Mercury. To be honest, I was more concerned for its well-being than that of the blandly blonde leading lady in the big mid-film car chase.

I know I’ve not been kind to it, but you might want to watch this film if you’d like some insight into how the Republican party sees the world. Buy Cobra from Amazon.co.uk.

Don’t drink the Viper.

I spent most of this film wondering what the fuck was going on, then giggling at the next gruesome development.

In some gruesome suburb of New York a batch of poisonous hooch makes a bad situation even worse. The bums unfortunate enough to drink it dissolve into multi-hued, acidic gloop, but that’s just the end of their problems. They live in the urban apocalypse that was New York in the eighties, mostly in a sprawling scrapyard full of feral and vicious homeless people, preyed on by a murderous Vietnam vet who has nightmares about vampire Cong. There’s also a violent and dumb cop, an equally stupid wiseguy and the venal shop owner who dug up the brew in the first place.

All the grotesques circle each other, fighting, swearing, occasionally melting and, at one point, running around after a severed penis until, somehow, there’s a resolution of sorts. That’s the true wonder of this movie, that it could be coherent enough to wrap so many of its incoherent parts up into an ending. There’s no message or moral and the melting effects are more hilarious than horrible, but if you have an hour and a half you don’t mind losing to nonstop WTF this could be the way to do it.

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Giallo meets procedural.

I was expecting something sleazy with this film, but actually got an effective little Police procedural. I found myself comparing it, favourably, to casa Spinneyhead guilty pleasure Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. It’s like an episode of the series that had the balls to show you some of the sleaze and horror rather than being all worthy about the subject.

When a teenage girl is found hung, naked, in an attic room it’s assumed that she has committed suicide. However, it quickly becomes obvious that she was murdered. Piece by piece, her relationships and movements are tracked until it’s revealed that she was part of a schoolgirl prostitution ring with some rich and powerful clients. (Magnum Cop centred on a schoolgirl prostitution ring, was this a recurring theme in 70s Italian crime flicks.) As the cop in charge and the female DA he’s working with get closer to the truth more bodies start piling up, victims of a motorbike riding, meat cleaver wielding enforcer.

All of the appropriate tropes are present- ketchup red blood, nudity and sleaze and a car chase- but they’re deployed intelligently rather than to cover cracks in the story. There’s a rather lofty and self-congratulatory bit at the beginning where we’re told that this is an honest and unflinching study of the subject. Though that’s an overstatement, I can forgive it.

Possibly the best of the Italian thrillers I’ve watched in the last few months, I recommend this film.

Buy What Have They Done To Your Daughters? on Amazon UK.