Director: Frank Harris
Writer: Frank Harris
From: Cult Cinema
A National Guard armory is robbed and the weapons start showing up on the black market. Police Lt. Long must marshal all his investigative powers to stop the violence from spiraling out of control.
This is my birthday weekend so instead of randomly selecting movies, I’m doing a goofy 80’s-action double-feature. Specifically, it’s a Frank Harris-directed, Leo Fong & Cameron Mitchell double-feature. The companion piece will be Low Blow!
Don’t you hate when your birthday gifts turn out to be crap?
I thought I knew what to expect from this movie due to seeing it reviewed on Best of the Worst, but that didn’t give me a proper sense of how dull the movie would be. In fact, their take it made it seem a lot more entertaining than it was.
To get to the movie itself, we open with Nighthawk, the enforcer/second-in-command to Cameron Mitchell (our lord and savior), shooting a guard at a National Guard armory and stealing all the weapons. Mitchell gives the order to make sure no one besides him is selling guns in town so Nighthawk takes a few goons to a Chinese restaurant and shoots up the place. You’d think this would lead to a plot about a gang war jumping off among the local gun-runners, but it doesn’t. Nothing comes of the shooting.
Likewise, Nighthawk then sells some guns to a few criminals who proceed to shoot up a grocery store. Nighthawk gave them instructions to leave no witnesses so they kill everyone in the store even though it’s just a simple robbery. While these criminals come up again later in the movie, this event also has no lasting impact.
We’re still in the introductory part of the movie, by the way. We haven’t even met our heroes and we’ve already seen two gun-heavy action setpieces. The movie does not maintain this pace.
Eventually our heroes arrive: Lt. Long (Leo Fong), and Agent Bryant (Richard Roundtree). That’s right, the movie got Shaft. They don’t make good use of him. Long and Bryant are supposed to be working together, but rarely even share a scene. The investigation keeps getting stymied since anyone who may be a lead gets immediately killed by Nighthawk or someone hired by Nighthawk (who Nighthawk then promptly kills). The movie never has a sense of movement. Not only does it never feel like the cops are closing in on the villains, it never feels like the villains are moving towards some goal of their own.
Bryant gets killed just as Long is posing as an arms-buyers and arranging a meeting with Mitchell and Nighthawk. On the day of the deal, Nighthawk cuts Mitchell’s throat and handles the deal himself. Once the guns are presented, the police spring their ambush, killing all of Nighthawk’s men. Long and Nighthawk trade shots with each other with Long finally shooting Nighthawk… as does Mitchell. Turns out he’s not dead and ends up contributing the killing shots. When Long starts reading Mitchell his rights, Mitchell dies. THE END.
The movie feels like a giant shrug. The energy’s highest when Roundtree, Mitchell, or Nighthawk (Stack Pierce) is on screen. Not only are they the best actors, they’re doing the most interesting things. Roundtree just has presence. He only needs to be in the shot to make it more interesting. Meanwhile, Mitchell is playing his crime boss as a weirdo sociopath. He has a black poodle that he dotes over early in the movie that simply disappears later. We learn in a rambling monologue Mitchell has that the dog is dead (we never learn how). Even that monologue is so strange—no other character has one and Mitchell’s isn’t until his penultimate scene—that we’re in delightfully WTF territory as it’s playing out. Finally, Nighthawk is just cool. He’s the character that’s actually out in the world setting events in motion and he can’t be stopped. He even gets shot early in the movie and doesn’t flinch! When you place him alongside Mitchell, you have the kind of glorious unpredictability that makes exploitation cinema so compelling.
Unfortunately they’re absent from the majority of the middle. Instead we have Leo Fong and the limp direction of Frank Harris. I thought Fong was mumbling all his lines until I heard all the actual non-actors from the police station they filmed at reading their parts. The characters are so flat and affectless in this middle portion that I kept pausing to see how much time was left. While this part of the movie has fight scenes, they’re shot so poorly—generally long shots with no dynamic edits—and performed so slowly that I couldn’t get excited. I honestly spent the majority of the movie waiting for it to end.
It may be redundant to say at this point, but I don’t recommend this movie. Listening to Best of the Worst go over it was more entertaining, but also gave the impression that there’s more bite to the movie than there is. Their video pretty much hits all the key moments from the movie, the most watchable ones at least, which saves you the work of watching the whole thing. If you choose to watch it anyway, I’d suggest riding the fast-forward button just to see Roundtree, Mitchell, and Pierce’s scenes. The rest just doesn’t offer much.
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