#3: HARD TARGET (1993)

Don't hunt what you can't kill.

In historic Crescent City, men of little means and no hope are being hunted for sport, arranged by sociopath Emil Fouchon and his second-in-command Pik van Cleef. For the right price, the willing participant will be given a belt-strap filled with ten thousand dollars and ordered to follow only one guideline: run. Should the prey make it to the designated endpoint, he shall not only win the game, but also the cash in his belt—a ticket to a second chance. And all he has to risk is...his life. It's during one of these hunts where a homeless war veteran is felled by a hunter's arrow, and once it's become obvious that he's gone missing, his daughter, Natasha, comes to New Orleans to figure out what's become of him. It's there that she meets a poorly-dressed, mulleted, and nearly indecipherable local named Chance Boudreaux, whom she hires to guide her in traversing the criminal underbelly to find out once and for all what's happened to her father. They soon cross paths with a New Orleans police detective who seems hesitant to get involved, but does so only after learning that the institutions on which the police department depend may not just be corrupt, but in league with the very shadowy group of men she is investigating. It's not long after that the mystery of "the game" slowly starts to unravel, men are kicked across the world, and Chance Boudreaux slaps the head of his snake until it goes limp. Some men are sitting ducks; others are a HARD TARGET.

Hard Target was written by Chuck Pfarrer, also responsible for the loony Navy Seals, the awesome Darkman, and many other films that cause him cold shudders whenever someone whispers their titles even thousands of miles away (virusredplanetbarbwire uggggghhhhhhh), but the big reason behind Hard Target's "success" is a name infamous for high-testosterone, operatic, and completely unhinged action. A man who broke out in a big way on the international independent scene before coming to these American shores to make his domestic debut. So what director has bestowed upon us the most exaggerated western in history? Who has the fascination with doves, eye close-ups, unnecessary flips, trench coats, and post-production slow-motion?

Not who, but Woo. John Woo—the only director esteemed enough to appear twice in this top ten list of action absurdity is the crazyman also responsible for the number nine pick, Face/Off.

Hard Target was John Woo's first American film, and how that came to be has a couple different versions. Rumors abound it was Van Damme's urging that John Woo leave his native China to come and work on his first big American film (and this rumor is further perpetuated by Van Damme's own semi-autobiographical film JCVD). Other versions have it that it was Universal Pictures themselves who were courting the director, and that while Woo was receptive, he was actually pursuing Kurt Russell for the role of Chance Boudreaux (which not only would have been its own form of awesome—he already had the mullet and everything—but would seemingly put Van Damme's involvement in Woo's China-to-Hollywood migration in question). Added to that, Hard Target isn't groundbreaking just because it was the first American film of John Woo's career, but it was actually the first time an Asian filmmaker had directed what was considered a tentpole film for a major American studio. Because of this, during production, Universal execs were very nervous, being that one of their own had entrusted a multi-million dollar production to a director who spoke very little English, so it was requested that Hollywood superstar Sam Raimi, an executive producer on the picture, be on set in the event that he had to "take over" production—something that thankfully never happened.

A direct riff on the nearly 100-year-old short story "The Most Dangerous Game," which by 1993 had seen many interpretations, Hard Target appropriated the famous tale once again, this time as less of a satirical thriller and more as a western—right down to Boudreaux's "boots," his skill with a handgun (upside down though it may be), and his first on-screen appearance that has him sitting at a bar and the camera going in close on his eyes, which is not just a Woo trademark, but a western one. Take that, add the twangy guitar/finger-snaps score by Graeme Revell, the New Orleans storefronts indicative of an old west town, and that genre-defining battle of a few good versus many evil, and the western motif has never felt more at home. That the film is set in New Orleans solely to suit Van Damme's thick accent thankfully not only avoids handicapping Hard Target's western influences, but rather complements it quite well, in that it highlights the incompetence and corruption of the New Orleans police department (it wasn't often, in the western genre, that law enforcement were directly responsible for expunging the evil from their on-the-nose named town) while also heightening the economic disproportion that still exists in the Crescent City today.

Hard Target is immensely silly from beginning to end. A "guy" movie through and through, so much that the character of Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler) is painted to be utterly useless without the presence of a man to help her. She's not on screen for ten minutes before she's crying and getting slapped around by a group of thugs looking to rob and perhaps rape, opening the door for Van Damme to enter, destroy those men's limbs, and hand Natasha back her purse and admonish her for counting out her cash in public. In a "real" film, especially in the modern era where blockbusters like Mad Max: Fury Road are invading theaters with the inexplicably controversial notion that women can be pretty bad-ass, this kind of gross undervaluing of the female lead would be tantamount to misogyny, but in Hard Target, it's all for the best, as, no shit, it's Van Damme's name on the poster. That is why audiences have bought the tickets (this argument comes up again later), so that's what the filmmakers were going to provide. (It doesn't help that Butler appears to be on a heavy dose of lithium during her entire doe-eyed performance, anyway.)

Despite it being heavily inspired by the famous concept of one man hunting another for sport, the plot of Hard Target is the most inconsequential thing about it. Upon its initial theatrical release, even the most discerning critics and harshest reviews had no choice but to acknowledge the sheer spectacle of the film and the magnitude of the stunts, dismissive of the overall plot though they may have been. And in all honesty, had Van Damme, Henriksen, and these same gun battles and motorcycle stunts and explosions been surgically removed and implanted into an entirely different plot, it wouldn't have mattered. Nothing is really gained from the "man is the most dangerous game" concept beyond motivations for both our hero and our villain to eventually come head-to-head while taking a hundred lives in the process. That a group of rich men are selling organized murders of the poor eventually becomes nothing more than window dressing: Van Damme letting loose kicks and punches and gunshots and explosions would have sold any film in 1993. This time, it just so happened to be selling Hard Target.

THE GOOD GUY

Chance Boudreaux. Able seaman. Captain beater. Food critic. Deadbeat union member. Amateur detective-for-hire. Lifetime pedestrian. Bayou born-and-bred. Nephew to the oatmeal guy. Unlicensed punching bag. Doctor hater. Substitute masseuse. Snake wrangler.

Hard Target not only returns John Woo to the fold, but also our beloved Muscles from Brussels, who appeared here previously in the number six pick Universal Soldier. Following that 1992 display of macho bravado, Van Damme appeared in Nowhere to Run, offering an atypically understated performance, and provided a cameo as himself in the underrated Last Action Hero before donning the mullet, the trench coat, and the Timberlands of Chance Boudreaux. His take on the lone gunslinger with the mysterious past is as muted as one might expect—and cowboys certainly don't speak with a Belgian accent—but the posturing and bigger-than-life persona is certainly ever in place. Many of these western-hero characters were deeply flawed individuals shooting men through saloon windows not only because they were pretty pissed off and tired of everyone's shit, but because of that "r" word: redemption. Whether drunks, or aging, or guilty of some anonymous past indiscretion, they quite reluctantly embraced the honorary title of "hero." In Hard Target, Chance doesn't embrace that title due to any particular urge to redeem himself and make up for any especially haunting past sin—not only because the film begins and he's already clearly the hero, but because, frankly, the script for Hard Target ain't tryin' that hard. This is evident at the end when Fouchon demands to know why Boudreaux began meddling in his affairs and Boudreaux responds it's because he was bored.

Chance Boudreaux apparently knows everyone in New Orleans, from ornery diner waitresses, to homeless men, to seedy pornography advertisers, to madams at brothels. To the more discerning viewer, it would seem that such infamy would violate the preordained rules of the mysterious gunslinger, especially with the conflict taking place on the streets of his very own home, rather than the streets of a town into which he had just ridden. But where Van Damme may lack as a gunslinger in external construction he makes up for thematically. He's got the mysterious past down, he's kind of a lowlife, and he inserts himself into the inner workings of law enforcement once he realizes that they're kind of infantile without him. Plus he rides a horse during the finale while shooting a bunch of dudes, you idiots.

Up to this point, Van Damme had opened several films that were designed around his impressive fighting style, which pertained to their own sub-genre of the action world, and which were all nearly identical in their plots: man who fights well is drawn hesitantly into a fighting scenario out of sense of revenge or necessity and eventually wins the day. These films—Bloodsport, Kickboxer, Lionheart—are entertaining for what they are, but sometimes audiences want more—more violence, that is. More grue, more death, more destruction. Universal Soldier would be the first film with Van Damme as the star where the fighting styles are dialed down and guns are finally placed into his hands. After the one-two punch of Universal Soldier and then Hard Target, audiences were delighted to be seeing what they were seeing: Van Damme not just high-kicking dudes across Planet Earth, but seeing him whip out a gun and finishing his victims' descent into space.

In the mid-'90s, Van Damme was at the absolute height of his superstardom. In fact, Hard Target would prove to be the beginning of the end of his box office domination. Following on Hard Target's heels would be the first of three collaborations with filmmaker Peter Hyams, beginning with Timecop, the last film with Van Damme as the lead to make significant bank. While his immediate films to come would assure a modicum of silliness (Sudden Death is among the most entertaining of the Die Hard rip-offs), Hard Target would see Van Damme not just appearing in his most ridiculous film, and not at his most ridiculous looking, but would prove to be "the" film—the one in which the action hero idolized by genre fans would achieve the "one-man army" title and lay a record number of bad guys to waste, all while making the goofiest of faces every single solitary time he fired a gun.

THE BAD GUY

Emil Fouchon. Literal man hunter. Hyperbolic drug dealer. Cash slammer. Thompson Center Arms Contender wielder. Existentialist. The most infuriated pianist in existence.

Lance Henriksen is god of the b-movies and the greatest actor that will ever appear within these hallowed Murdered Men halls. The nicest man you have ever met is capable of playing the most sadistic, sociopathic villain this side of World War II. Long and better-known as having portrayed Bishop in Aliens, Ed Harley in several chapters of Pumpkinhead, Frank Black on cult television show Millennium, and "the Father" in personal favorite No Escape, Lance Henriksen can appear in the biggest piece of shit you've ever seen and make you glad you're watching it—that's the power behind his talent. He has been turning in extremely solid but mostly supporting character work ever since his first feature film appearance in Dog Day Afternoon back in the dark ages of 1975. Though his filmography lists a litany of titles that sound as unappealing as they likely are (his self-admitted "alimony movies"), there's one thing that can be guaranteed: no matter how many people in those films melt, or explode, or meet the teeth of aliens/mutant Bigfeet, Henriksen is going to be putting 100% into his performance as whatever good guy/bad guy/voice-over-only character that he's playing. He's as dedicated to his craft as they come, hailing from the old school of method-acting. Motherfucker was so in-tune that he for-realsies allowed himself to be set on fire in the third-act scene of Hard Target, during which the flames flared a bit more than anyone anticipated, forcing him to rip off his fiery coat and hurl it at the nearest wall..all while staying in character to complete the scene. That cool thing you did once and keep telling people about?

It will never be that cool.

What makes all the films featured in Top Ten Murdered Men so worthy of celebration is admittedly that delectable permeation of irony—that undercurrent of unintended humor that heightens the level of audience enjoyment. To be specific, would Hard Target have benefited from utilizing another performer as the lead (like Kurt Russell) who could not only display the kind of skillful choreography of which Van Damme was capable, but all while offering a solid performance free of the kind of foreign-tongued baggage that's come to define so many of our action stars? Sure, more than one person would argue that a stronger performance makes for a stronger film. But what kind of film needs to be strengthened? Which aspect would be ultimately reinforced? Would it benefit anyone at all if one could go back in time and start plugging stronger aspects into Hard Target, in effect creating a "better" film? Fuck no. Hard Target is a product of both purposeful and accidental sensibilities, a beautiful amalgamation of success and failure—and this more than includes the somewhat stunted performance by our leading split-doer. The legendary status that Hard Target has achieved has everything to do with the "shortcomings" of its own production.

While Henriksen is fully aware of the over-the-top nature of the story and that it's not to be taken seriously, he knows that the best way to contribute is to dial up his performance of Emil Fouchon way past eleven. If Boudreaux's arch nemesis plays the piano, then he's going to play the ever loving fucking shit out of that piano, slamming every key with a near-maniacal look of unbridled fury splayed across his face. If he's going to dismissively throw money at an obese underling, he's going to slam that money across his fat back so hard he may as well be trying to slam it through him. If someone has the audacity to die slowly in front of him of a snake bite, thereby sincerely inconveniencing him, he's going to step on the corpse-to-be's chest and growl, "I'll fuck you, and then I'll eat you" before suggesting that his men "die quieter." And if, near the end, Fouchon realizes that he's losing control over "the game," he's not just going to react in anger—he's going to spin disjointedly, surrounded by flames, bellowing at the wall, screaming indecipherably, grunting like an uncaged animal following years of vicious abuse. Saliva will spatter from his mouth as he screams primal threats into the air surrounding them all, pure ferocity emanating from his every fiber. "There isn't a country in the world I haven't fired a bullet in!" he screams. "You can't kill me! I'm on every battlefield!" Castor Troy was a cartoon villain, as was Andrew Scott and Manny Fraker before him. But Emil Fouchon feels dangerous, and the mythos of his character is deeply unsettling. As he makes it known in the film, Fouchon and co. have traveled throughout not just Louisiana, and not just the United States, but the entire world, setting up games of ritualized murder for the super rich. He's become super rich by selling not just men, but the opportunity to kill those men, to the wealthiest of sociopaths—people so bored with their vast fortunes that it takes controlled-setting murder to feel alive again. And in one particular scene when his client shows hesitation about satisfying their contract—shows immense unease at the mere idea of taking another man's life—Fouchon becomes incensed, ordering him to finish the job before walking away and muttering, "God, why didn't he just go fishing?" This is all because Fouchon feels nothing, no empathy whatsoever toward his fellow man. He's not just disappointed that his client won't take advantage of his delivered prey, but it actually enrages him, as if "the game" were just another everyday activity. His entire being is predicated on selling lives, and the notion that other people aren't as enthusiastic about such a thing doesn't just confound him, but infuriates him.

There's nothing ironically good about Henriksen's performance. Every seemingly silly thing is not a happy accident, nor is it going for one thing but inadvertently achieving something different. Henriksen's performance is by careful, distinctive design. For once, the actor playing the villain is fully in on the joke and embraces it to maximum effect.

In a move similar to that of Steven Seagal's during the post-production on Out for Justice, it was at Van Damme's orders that Henriksen's scenes be reduced in the final cut, as he was likely concerned about being upstaged in the very film where he played the lead role. This longer cut—known as the "John Woo workprint version"—has become long sought-after in the bootleg market and sadly has never materialized anywhere in any legitimate form.

From Wiki:

Van Damme went with his own editor to make his own edit of the film. Van Damme's version excises whole characters to insert more scenes and close-ups of his character Chance. When asked about this edit, Van Damme replied that, "People pay their money to see me, not to see Lance Henriksen."

While Van Damme's presence will always guarantee a certain attraction, Hard Target could have only benefited from further pure and unfiltered Lance Henriksen. Simply put, there's praise, there's hyperbole, and then there's truth: no one in the world could have played the role of Emil Fouchon with the same gravitas, the same bombastic approach, and lastly, the same sincerity.

Pik van Cleef. Number two of Emil Fouchon. Literal ear-lowerer. Scissors stabber. Heffer hater. Feelings considerer. Potential Irishman.

Arnold Vosloo was Mummy.

THE CASUALTIES

The Bad Guys

One motorcyclist shoots a gas can thrown at him (?) and turns into a full-on conflagration. One getaway driver and one motorcyclist receive bullets into their person. One motorcyclist gets his neck broken by an almighty boot. One motorcyclist takes several bullets before getting slammed head-on by another motorcycle. One henchman gets blown up by some exploding moonshine. One henchman gets pulverized by a shotgun...while in a helicopter...which was fired from a horse. One motorcyclist catches a gas can tossed his way before it's shotgunned, blowing him into beautiful smithereens and his motorcycle through a window. Two henchmen are literally shotgunned INTO fire. One henchman gets choked out with the butt of a shotgun before receiving a tremendous spin-kick to the face and is later shot nine times with a handgun. Another motorcyclist receives more of the same. One henchman gets an arrow through the neck. One leather-clad misogynist gets shot pointblank in the chest. One cowboy-clad henchman gets a dose of hot lead. Two more henchmen get double-handgunned. Three henchmen get riddled with bullets, the last of them falling down the stairs. Thee more henchmen, one of whom drops a grenade, get red holes blown in them. One henchman gets whipped in the face with a grenade wrapped in a shirt and killed by the shotgun stolen from his startled hands. van Cleef gets shot so many times even the NRA cringed from the excess and closed their Twitter account.

The Good Guys

One homeless man (a cameo from the film's screenwriter) and father to our damsel in distress is shot with painful looking arrows before drowning in a river. One corrupt doctor (the sheriff from Friday the 13th: Part 5—A New Beginning who says "it's Jason Voorhees!" and gets an ashtray thrown at him) gets shot in the eye through his door's peephole. One Vietnam veteran is hunted through the graveyard, but actually manages to take out the hunter who paid to kill him, before being executed in the street with an automatic weapon (during which a few innocent bystanders may or may not meet their ends.) One very obese games arranger gets the top of his head blown off at pointblank range via shotgun. Detective Mitchell (Candyman's Kasi Lemmons) gets sheared by a shotgun blast before taking several more MP4 shots to the chest.

THE BEST KILL

No contest. Boudreaux standing entirely up on a motorcycle leaking gasoline and heading straight for a Bronco full of bad guys, and then LEAPING over the entire vehicle in time to shoot them from behind and blow them the fuck up, not only takes the cake for best kill, but frankly, should be in every movie in existence.

Runner up goes to Boudreaux shooting Sven-Ole Thorsen far more times than the clip of his upside handgun allows—29 shots, to be exact—before delivering a completely unnecessary roundhouse kick to the face of the man whom, at that point, is quite obviously very dead.

THE DAMAGE

Boudreaux gets manhandled during the first act while doing some investigatory work. He's later punched in the face, cut on the arm, and beaten with a fiery 2x4. He also ends up in front of several explosions, none of which seem to faze him in any way beyond propelling him nearer to the next man he needs to shoot.

And in case you're wondering, Uncle Douvet (Wilford Brimley) gets stabbed with an arrow, but no one really gives a shit about this character, do they?

THE BAD GUY'S COMEUPPANCE

Boudreaux fires a pretty gnarly shotgun into Fouchon's shoulder, sending him flipping backwards across the room before rushing at him, delivering the most bad-ass jump kick of the film, followed by an array of kicks to the chest, punches to the face, and one grenade dropped down his pants. To his credit, Henriksen manages to upstage his own death sentence by at first laughing at what he assumes to be a dud of a grenade before seeing its spark ignite to blow him to confetti, punctuating his life with "oop!"

THE LINE

"Hunting season is over."

THE VERDICT

A parody of Hard Target would look exactly like Hard Target, and that's why it rules as hard as it does. What may not have been ludicrous in 1993 is very ludicrous now, and it only adds to the enjoyment. Van Damme delivers his most satisfying film in the sub-genre of absurd action, Henriksen provides an award-winning performance as the ultimate unhinged villain, and John Woo somehow manages to create spectacle that's even more absurd than that other film he made about the two men who switch faces, live, and spend two hours trying to kill each other with broken glass. Hard Target's original incarnation may have been sullied by the ego of one particular mullet-sporting high-kicker, but there's no denying that the finished product was a full-on bull's-eye.

#6: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992)

The ultimate weapons of the future have just declared war… on each other.

It is 1969. Army Private Luc Deveraux and his sergeant, Andrew Scott, are deep in the thick rainy jungles of North Vietnam, under orders to secure a village and hold tight for reinforcements. Things go very wrong when Deveraux discovers that many of his squad members are dead, along with nearly all of the village's innocent civilians. The culprit for this mayhem is Sergeant Scott, who wears a necklace of cut-off ears as a trophy. Scott, who is holding two children hostage, shoots one of them and demands that Deveraux shoot the other to prove his loyalty to "the cause." Deveraux refuses, a grenade makes an appearance, the young hostage dies, and the two soldiers shoot each other to death. They are dead for good RIP just kidding. Resurrected an unknown number of years later in a government program called “Universal Soldier,” Deveraux and Scott’s corpses have been transformed into semi-living cyborgs of sorts, stripped of their memories, and put into action to alleviate a hostage situation at the Hoover Damn. Deveraux works efficiently; Scott works drastically. Though the problem is alleviated, UniSol officials are worried about Scott’s overly aggressive methods. During this time, both Deveraux’s and Scott’s memories begin to come back – they each remember the incident that took place in Vietnam, and Scott becomes convinced that Deveraux is a traitorous enemy who must be eliminated. When Veronica Roberts, a television reporter, comes sniffing around, UniSol powers command Deveraux and Scott to go and take care of her, only Deveraux absconds with the reporter, leaving Scott to pursue the both of them across the country to Deveraux’s home in Louisiana. Throughout their journey, Deveraux and Veronica will learn the truth about the UniSol program, men will be pummeled and/or killed, ears will be removed, UniSol will lose all control they thought they had over their program, and Deveraux will discover his love for shitty diner food.

Universal Soldier was directed by Roland Emmerich, perhaps the most well-known filmmaker to appear within these hallowed halls of Murdered Men so far. Yes, the man most famous for destroying a handful of major cities in Independence Day, along with a lot of other films with similar amounts of destruction but with far less rewatchability, has bestowed upon us quite handily the most entertaining film of his career. Story credit goes to Richard Rothstein (writer on The Bates Motel – Bud Cort, not Freddie Highmore) and Christopher Leich (director-for-hire for television), but the screenplay credit goes to Emmerich’s one-time writing partner Dean Devlin (whose collaboration with Emmerich ended after the disastrous Godzilla remake). It’s when one compares Universal Soldier against the rest of Emmerich’s directorial career when the realization sets in just how special the film actually is. And if you’ve seen Universal Soldier, you’re probably laughing out loud at that, but, it’s true. One of the very few films in Emmerich’s filmography to receive an R-rating (and one well deserved), Universal Soldier surprisingly shows off a side of the director who’s more than willing to get down and gritty with the violence the story demands. Between this and the director’s other R-rated effort, The Patriot, a reasonably entertaining film which manages to survive drowning in its pervading feeling of self-importance, and which also contains a rather surprisingly dark undertone of violent acts, committed on screen of course, but also present in one of Mel Gibson’s most infamous monologues (the one about cutting off enemy soldiers’ hands and feet and sending them in baskets down the river for more enemy soldiers to find), Emmerich clearly enjoys these darker stories, and it’s a shame his career has been mostly relegated to Michael Bay-like extravaganzas of family-friendly special effects and gimmicky storytelling.

A low-budget independent affair, Universal Soldier was bankrolled by Carolco Pictures, who were in financial trouble at the time and who were very much hoping that this film would be their knight in shining camo. Originally envisioned as an attempt to adapt the comic book series “Deathlok the Demolisher” to the screen, the script was ultimately passed over and retooled to stand as its own adventure. It did reasonably well domestically but very well internationally (which seems to be the case quite often with the action genre); still, one gets the feeling that Emmerich doesn’t enjoy going out of his way to talk about it, figuring his bigger budget efforts starring John Cusack or Jake Gyllenhaal are somehow more notable. (They’re not.)

Though the later Universal Soldier sequels to come (directed by John Hyams; interview here) take the UniSol concept and make actual, honest-to-gosh good films, it’s a shame Carolco couldn’t continue the Universal Soldier name with proper sequels rather than the very strange path on which it instead struck out. Still, as diverse and ill-advised as many of the true sequels turned out to be, it still proved that this was a concept later filmmakers thought was worthy of revisiting. While one might argue that the two most recent sequels are better films than the original, there is no denying that Universal Soldier drips with everything action aficionados demand – an appealing and established lead hero and villain, a sexy and spunky femme sidekick, a healthy dose of violence, an even healthier dose of senseless destruction married to seas of broken glass, consistent and cheeseball humor, and perhaps most importantly, an utter and definitive display of superiority committed by our hero against all the other hapless meat puppets who for whatever reason believe they’re worthy of even breathing his air. To be specific, the diner scene. To be more specific, who the fuck is this eleventh guy who tries to throw down against the clearly invincible Luc Deveraux and think that he’s going to be the one to take him out – that he’ll be victorious where the previous TEN DUDES failed? This particular trope is a well that’s gone back to repeatedly in this genre, and it’s one that will never grow tired.

There are a few cameos worth noting: of all people, Jerry Orbach makes an unexpected return to Top Ten Murdered Men, his first appearance being in #7’s Out for Justice. Following that, we get Tommy “Tiny” Lister likely garnering the most exclamations of “Hey, it’s that guy!” But the most interesting one belongs to the blink-and-miss appearance of Michael Jai White, who has not only enjoyed a spotty but mostly entertaining career where he’s been able to show off his fighting skills on screen (he was also Black Dynamite!), but who would also make another appearance in Universal Soldier: The Return as a new character, the villain to battle against the also-returning Luc Deveraux.

Universal Soldier: The Return is a dreadful piece of shit, by the way.

Speaking of, and not surprisingly, Universal Soldier was torn apart by critics upon its release, many of them labeling it a cheap imitation attempting to ride the coat tails of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Even The Austin Chronicle quipped, “Universal Soldier may flex its muscles at every opportunity, but it’s still second-rate Schwarzenegger.”

Ouch.

THE GOOD GUY

Luv Deveraux aka GR44. Soldier of misfortune. Reanimated corpse. Kind of a robot. Efficient assassin. Cool as ice. Shedder of clothes. Impressive penis owner. Inadvertent traitor. Enthusiastic food eater. Stiffer of diner checks. Inexplicably a product of Rance Howard’s semen.

Jean-Claude Van Damme has one of the better but typical Hollywood stories – the actor who started off in obscurity, slowly gained prominence, became an American sensation, and then lost it all in a fit of cocaine addiction, claims of domestic abuse, and even a diagnosis of bi-polar disorder. It was in the late ’90s that he experienced a massive decline in results at the box office, which is all it takes before an actor ends up in direct-to-video hell. However, except for a stinker here and there (Derailed is still one of the worst things you’ll ever see), Van Damme has actually exercised pretty good judgment in choosing quality projects in which to take part – more so than any of his other colleagues who have since begun a career which bypasses theaters. His repeat collaborations with directors Ringo Lam (Replicant), Ernie Barbarash (Assassination Games), and John Hyams (the two latest Universal Soldier entries) have not only resulted in films actually worth a damn (direct-to-video though they may be), but many of them are superior to the films from the portion of Van Damme’s career that actually made it to theaters and did well financially. Let’s not forget his titular role in the somewhat autobiographical JCVD, where he plays a loose version of himself as a failure of a father and husband, and who finds himself in a bank robbery/hostage situation, but is unable to convey the point that he’s not the action superstar known on screen for so long – that he’s just a man, and one not brave enough to save the day. His performance in JCVD is remarkable, allowing him to use his native tongue for once, and his long, unbroken monologue where he uses the camera as a confessional is an extremely powerful moment that has the ability to commit some serious Van Dammage against your heart.

Because, in Universal Soldier, he’s playing a half-robot/half-corpse cocktail, his ability to show emotions is restrained by either the demands of the role or by his own performance abilities that were approaching the end of their formative years. What this largely amounts to is Van Damme walking around accidentally making ironic comments and observations with an utter look of blankness on his face. And that’s fine – we’re not exactly looking for an Olivier-level complexity from our lead who is essentially playing Frankenstein’s monster. What Van Damme brings to the role is all that was really required; he looks sad every so often, but not too sad, in the same way that Universal Soldier itself wants to be original, but not too original. It would be later, in films like Timecop or Double Team, in which Van Damme would be given the chance to show off his personality and really embrace his action star persona, rattling off pun-douched catch phrases with reckless abandon.

THE BAD GUY

Andrew Scott aka GR13. Also reanimated corpse. Also kind of a robot. Ruthless assassin. Wearer of ear necklaces. Overly strict platoon leader. Shooter of bus drivers. Sufferer from the most extreme PTSD on record. Coiner of the phrase, “Are we having fun yet?”

Welcome back, Dolph! Yes, after having been the first featured action hero in Murdered Men with #10’s The Punisher, Lundgren returns to check in and remind us all that, yeah, he’s still kind of a bad ass. It is here, in Universal Soldier, that he presents the best on-screen character from his entire career – that’s counting both hero and villain. Far more entertaining than his villainous turn as Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, a film as deluded as to its own significance to legitimate cinema as it is inexplicably beloved by film fans everywhere, Lundgren’s Andrew Scott is one of the great action cinema adversaries. Despite being a reanimated corpse raped with robot parts, and still suffering from his demons of war, you have never seen a villain having a better time with how psychologically fucked up he is. Lundgren, rarely given the opportunity to go bad on screen (the first Expendables doesn’t count), is a thing to behold in Universal Soldier, besting Van Damme’s screen presence in every way. This isn’t to say that Van Damme doesn’t make for a good screen presence here because he definitely does; it’s just that it’s the villain who usually provides the more memorable turn, and the actor playing him knows it, and so they wrap their thespian arms around their evil madman and embrace him with all the love and dedication they can muster. Speaking of, when Dolph holds out his ear necklace and asks, “Do you hear me?” only he’s NOT doing this to be funny, God cries because he has never created anything as beautiful.

 THE CASUALTIES

Pre-corpsebot Deveraux stabs Andrew Scott in the gut with a bayonet.

Post-corpsebot Deveraux fires off a satisfying silent shot into the head of a terrorist and commits violent body trauma against another before shooting an enemy UniSol in the face.

Pre-corpsebot Scott shoots one casualty of war point black in the face and blows up that casualty's sister with a grenade before shooting his fellow soldier, Luc, in the chest.

Post-corpsebot Scott shoots two terrorists and cracks the neck/crushes the skull of another; blows the head off of a paparazzo; shoots a colonel in the chest; forces a serum injection into a tech before snapping his neck; shoots two grocery store clerks he’s convinced are traitorous soldiers; and shreds a bus-driver with an M60.

Also, an anonymous UniSol takes out a terrorist with a hand gun cleverly hidden in a box with a gigantic camera lens sticking out of it and UniSol scientists order some of their soldiers to blow themselves up with grenades, which they do. Lastly, an unknown number of hostages at the Hoover Dam are killed by a bunch of terrorists, but except for one dude, this all occurs off-screen. Hey, save some for us! Violent death is awesome!

THE BEST KILL

Andrew Scott punching through a tech’s glass face shield and driving the shards into his face, which he smashes into messy meat with his fist, gets a trophy for best owie.

THE DAMAGE

Well, this will likely be the only “damage taken” ticker in all of Murdered Men that includes the main hero fucking dying, but, here we are! Deveraux also takes a bullet during his escape from the UniSol compound, which he “heals” with a cigarette lighter (don’t think too hard about this) even though technically he’s a corpse so he couldn’t really die of infection (don’t think too hard about this). He’s also garroted with piano wire; semi-blown up by a grenade and rolled over in a bus; pummeled about the chest and face and thrown into a barn door; and smashed headfirst through a car window and door (repeatedly).

Meanwhile, Sergeant Scott turns into Rigid Dolph Dummy as he flies through a windshield; gets his ass handed to him via dozens of high-flying kicks and face-slams during the finale fight before flying through a barn wall; gets his wrist broken pretty much in half; and then…

THE BAD GUY’S COMEUPPANCE

After a fiery and punch-ridden final battle, which takes place at the farm of the very accented Deveraux’s decidedly non-accented parents, Deveraux lets loose one final signature kick and sends Scott sailing through the air and landing on a very pointy field harvester. And if that weren’t enough, Deveraux flips the on-switch, and all those pointy spindle things rip Scott’s body apart, turning him into a pile of man meat. In case you’re wondering, yeah – Andrew Scott returns for two more Universal Soldier films. God bless the movies!

THE LINE

So many wonderful lines from which to choose. Scott bellowing “Now that’s the spirit, soldier!” has become franchise tradition, with “Are we have fun yet?” honing in on the runner-up slot. But a confused and nonplussed Luc Deveraux, after having kicked the asses of about a dozen men, all because they came after him when it was revealed he didn’t have the money to pick up the diner check, said, “I just want to eat.” With his mouth full of all the unauthorized food on which he’d just been gorging himself. Delightful.

THE VERDICT

Of all the films to be featured in Top Ten Murdered Men so far, Universal Soldier just might be the most innocent, carefree, and perhaps even the quintessential action film that defines what this column is all about. There’s just enough of a plot (albeit not a terribly original one) to give it a solid foundation, and that plot is silly enough so that you know not to take everything so seriously. Emmerich was wise enough to realize that his paying audience were interested in seeing Van Damme and Lundgren tear ass at each other for a full 90 minutes, and by making them super soldiers mostly incapable of inflicting any permanent damage on each other, that ass-tearing could go on and on and on. This simple 1992 film would go on to spawn a franchise of direct-to-video sequels, attempts at a television series, and even an art-house film festival darling, all of which went off in very different directions, but none of which were able to retain (or even necessitate) the wonderful tongue-in-cheek and knowing humor that permeates this cinematic match-up between two of the best action superstars who ever walked the soundstage.

#9: FACE-OFF (1997)

In order to catch him, he must become him. 

Los Angeles FBI agent Sean Archer, investigating a sociopath crime-lord (one Castor Troy), watches as his own son takes an assassin’s bullet that was actually meant for himself – fired by that very same crime-lord. With his life now mostly destroyed, Archer becomes obsessed with finally putting an end to Troy’s career of terrorism and espionage. Meanwhile, on the home front, Archer’s daughter begins to act out, and his wife doesn’t know how to talk to him. He snaps in anger at his investigatory team and finds no joy in pretty much any aspect of life. But finally, Archer and Troy eventually cross paths, and after an intense and dramatic confrontation at an airport hangar, the evil-minded genius and his brother are caught, with the former ending up in a coma and the latter in a maximum security prison. But with the brothers’ nefarious plot, which includes a ton of explosives, still poised to happen, Archer agrees to a highly experimental procedure in which he will switch faces with that of his arch nemesis in order to mine for information from his enemy’s brother and no one except for the three people doing the actual procedure will know who he really is and that includes his own family because why the fuck not? It sounds like a really good and low-stakes idea. But after the comatose Troy awakens to see that his face has been taken, and that there’s this other spare face floating around in this futuristic fish bowl, Troy takes a page out of Archer’s book and begins to infiltrate his dogged pursuer’s life with his new face, teaching Archer’s daughter how to stab, his wife how to sex, his boss how to die just by screaming at him, and everyone else just how much fun he is. With Archer and Troy now Troy and Archer, their pseudo-lives collide in a majestic art-installation of bullets, doves, and blowing, flapping, slow-motion coats. It’s awesome.

Man...Face/Off. Only in the ’90s did this sound like a good idea. And it not only sounded like a good idea, but it was a good idea. Following Nicolas Cage’s much-deserved Oscar win for his role in Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Hollywood did what it does: took advantage of his new spotlight and put him in nonsense very antithetical to his Oscar-winning performance, and he suddenly and inexplicably found himself the go-to action leading man. He would go on to star, back-to-back, in the holy Cage action trifecta of The Rock (1996), Con Air (1997), and Face/Off., Not only were these two of the best consecutive years in action history, it would turn out Cage had saved the best for last. And because this is a John Woo flick, you’re going to get all the doves, eye close-ups, and post-production slow motion you can stand. But that’s not all: John Travolta hams it up, Nicolas Cage whirls around while shooting for NO REASON, Gina Gershon uncharacteristically does not remove her clothes, and we get cameos from Tommy Flanagan, John Carroll Lynch, Thomas Jane, and Joe Bob Fuckin' Briggs. And it’s all glorious.

Face/Off is madness. For over two hours, the plot will be ludicrous, the performances will be cartoonish, and the action will be brutal and unending. Nothing about Face/Off should work. Not one executive in Hollywood should have finished a meeting that began with, “Okay, so, a good guy and a bad guy SWITCH FACES.” An Oscar-winner and a two-time Oscar-nominee should not have been spotted anyhere near this script, this concept, this unbelievable cacophony of cinematic insanity. But my god, it happened – somehow it all came together. Face/Off got the green light, it got the proven director, it got the legendary cast. It soon existed; it became a thing; the action genre hasn’t been the same since.

THE GOOD GUY(S)(?)

ON LEFT: Sean Archer. Mourning father. Distant husband. Ass-bug-infested member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Superior to The Wire's Bunny Colvin. Obsessed with catching the man indirectly responsible for the death of his son. Looks a lot like a corpse when under medical anesthesia.

Within the confines of the very eclectic dichotomy that Face/Off presents, Nicolas Cage is essentially playing two entirely different roles, though one would be considered his primary and the other his secondary. Once Cage picks up where Travolta left off, his layered and extremely interesting performance builds off the rather surprisingly philosophical foundation that is inexplicably present in this very stupid action film (the one that includes a speedboat-chase finale): that for a large portion of the running time, both men – prominent actors – are actually satirizing the art of acting into their own performances; i.e., actors are playing the part of two men playing a part. Going further, when it comes to Cage’s performance, he is playing a man who is still deeply hurting from the loss of his son – a hurt so deep that he’s inadvertently isolated himself from everyone around him – but he still has to find a way to act through that pain in order to successfully play the role of the life-loving carefree Castor Troy. It’s evident in the scene where Archer’s version of Troy is in the midst of a prison riot, and in between laughing uproariously and bellowing “I’m Castor Troy!” he is actually sobbing; or later, in Troy’s pad surrounded by his crime family, someone asks him how he knows so much about Sean Archer, so he confesses, “I sleep with his wife.” And as everyone around him laughs, and though Cage is laughing, too, he's just as conflicted about it as he seems genuinely amused by the irony. That right there is a perfect summation of the interesting parallelisms that Face/Off presents: whether Archer is himself, or masquerading as Castor Troy, he’s always acting like a man who is okay, and he’s not.

ON RIGHT: Uh…Sean Archer, also. Kind of. Sometimes. Everything character-based above applies. Especially the corpse thing.

In a film where there are two lead roles but still four major performances, sadly, one of those performances by one of those lead actors was going to end up being the weakest, and that dishonor falls to John Travolta’s take on Sean Archer. To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with his version of “the good guy” – it’s just that compared to Cage’s typically more-manic performances, or even when Travolta is up against his own take on Castor Troy, this version of Archer has little to do beyond walk around, look haunted, and shout at Margaret Cho. He does have a scene or two where he gets to offer some dynamism, but for the most part he just seems like that tight-ass at the office who is really wound up and abrupt. It’s okay though, because there’s only so much insanity one film can take before it ends up becoming something you watch in a film theory course, and so Travolta allows himself to play it low-key, knowing that it’s going to make his major transition from hero to villain that much more jarring and effective and a hell of a lot of fun.

THE BAD GUY(S)(!)

ON TOP: Castor Troy, fraternal twin brother of Pollox. Explosives enthusiast. Eater of peaches. Deviant of sexuality. Dove-flock-be’er-arounder.

Between his weird gay masseuse rumors, his awful career choices over the last twenty years, his controversial religion, and his delightful head-stuttering “Adele Dazeem” boner from that one year’s Oscars ceremony, John Travolta’s credibility has plummeted significantly – especially compared to his heyday when he was one of the most dependable and sought-after performers in Hollywood; he was handsome, energetic, professional, and kind. Because of that, it’s easy to forget just how fun he was capable of being. And speaking of fun, no one is having more of it than he is as Castor Troy. Though he has very little villainous screen-time in his career (he played another notable antagonist in John Woo’s Broken Arrow [1996]), he seemed to enjoy going for broke here, because there’s not one piece of scenery left unchewed by his unhinged, almost operatic performance. Whatever low levels to which his career has sadly devolved, Travolta will always be one cool-ass, cigarette-smoking, jazz-step dancing motherfucker.

ON BOTTOM: Uh…Castroy Troy, also. Shit.

Nicolas Cage, I have a question: where the fuck did this version of you go? What happened to the guy who used to utterly transform with his performances that he actually made audiences squirm in their seats while also delighting an entire generation of Youtubers?

Though Cage begins the film as the villain before becoming the hero, boy, during the time when he’s actually Castor Troy in both mind and body, it is a thing to behold. From gaping mouths to flamboyant delivery, Cage is all over this role with relish. It’s almost a shame that the switcheroo-based Face/Off hadn’t actually done its own switcheroo behind the scenes and switched the two leading men’s roles, so that Cage could have instead spent the majority of his screentime as the villain. Although at a running time of nearly 2.5 hours, perhaps that’s just too much Cage insanity for one film. (Having read that back, yeah, that’s a dumb thing to say.) Face/Off isn’t even out of the opening credits sequence and Cage is already hamming it up as a priest, head-banging to “Hallelujah” and grabbing the ass of a certainly underage choir singer. Once you stop to realize that Cage’s priest outfit has NOTHING to do with the plot, you will realize two things: Castor Troy is a maniac and Face/Off is incredible.

 THE CASUALTIES

No tally for good guys versus bad guys because give me a break – YOU try categorizing who counts as good guys and bad guys when the good guys and bad guys switch natures back and forth. Overall, there are 33 shootings, 3 dead by conflagration, 2 dead by various body trauma, one dead via harpoon gun, and one dead by a “whoopsie!” sniper’s bullet.

THE BEST KILL

Troy gets things going by shooting an undercover FBI agent in the gut who was pretending to be a stewardess, after of course he posited to her: “If I let you suck my tongue, would you be grateful?” Following this rather bloodthirsty execution, Troy looks at arch nemesis Sean Archer and shrugs in a manner of which Larry Fine would have been immensely proud.

THE DAMAGE

Sean Archer: an off-the-mark bullet through the shoulder intended for him, but which ends up in his son. Talk about a hole in two! He also undergoes: multiple prison fights; a bullet to the shoulder by his real daughter; major back and belly flops; a drop through a glass ceiling and a shard of glass into his side; an exploding speedboat blowing him onto shore; and several sucker-punches and body-hits with various metal pipes.

Castor Troy: a jet turbine slams him into Comaland; stabbed in the thigh by his fake daughter; his own glass-ceiling plummet and speedboat explosion; a pretty nasty and spiteful self-inflicted face-cutting; stabbed in leg with harpoon; and that same harpoon driven into his belly.

THE BAD GUY’S COMEUPPANCE

Only in Hollywood could Sean Archer and Castor Troy still be standing by film’s end, so when John Travolta finally meets his long-overdue harpoon, the audience gratefully lets out a collective sigh of relief, because based on the sheer amount of shoot-outs and chase scenes and explosions and broken glass already witnessed, they’ve been watching this film for, in John Woo time, the last nine years.

THE LINE

“I’d like to take his face…………………………………………………………………..off.”

“Dress up like Halloween, and ghouls will try to get in your pants.”

“DIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

THE VERDICT

In some ways, action cinema died a little on the day Face/Off was released in theaters all the way back in the realm of 1997. Not since then, in spite of all the giant robots and leather-clad dominatrix prostitutes and all the winking/nudging aimed at the camera, has an action film of such sheer gonzo appeal, massive entertainment value, and littered with career-high watermark performances hit theaters. Sadly, John Woo’s American career wouldn’t last much longer, as he would go on to make the critical and box-office disappointment Windtalkers (2002) before hightailing it back to his native China to make more serious-minded films.

Face/Off is bombastically stupid. But it’s also harmlessly and relentlessly entertaining. John Woo has thrown everything at the wall to see what sticks, and he does so with a praiseworthy Billy Mumphrey level of cockeyed optimism. The good news is...everything sticks. But there’s still one little niggling thought that has the potential to fester in the far corner of more learned action-film-fans’ minds whenever they sit down for an annual viewing. And it’s the notion that Face/Off's script had been knocking around Hollywood desks for years and years before it was finally greenlit…and at one point, instead of Cage and Travolta, it saw the potential first on-screen pairing of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. (Yeah, that slight quiver you just felt in your pants? That’s exactly what this column is all about.) What that signifies is that the importance of the casting for these two roles had been a major selling point since the minute this project caught someone’s eye, and even though taking Face/Off as we know it and implanting those two action megastars into either role, whether they were playing hero and then villain or villain and then hero, would have been the stuff of cinematic heart attack, the Face/Off that eventually came to be is just too good to sacrifice – for anything, or anyone.

WHITE FIRE (1984): THE DEFINITIVE INCESTUAL JAMES BOND RIP-OFF

 [Contains spoilers.]

Considering how often Hollywood stumbles upon a great idea and lays the groundwork for turning that great idea into a great movie, only to subsequently revisit that idea over and over with terrible sanctioned sequels or straight-up rip-offs, it’s amazing there aren’t more American-made James Bond imitations out there trekking the globe, neutralizing espionage, and generally making the genre more mediocre. It seemed filmmakers and financiers were a little less willing to borrow liberally from the imagination of author Ian Fleming and long-time Bond producer Albert Broccoli, so except for the Blaxploitation movement, which eagerly borrowed the character’s archetype of working undercover, bedding women, saving the day, and being a total bad-ass, resulting in some of the silliest movies of the sub-genre like 1977’s Black Samurai with Jim Kelly or 1973’s gender-swapping Cleopatra Jones with Tamara Dobson, you’d be hard-pressed to find many American productions riffing dangerously close to the concept. (Get Smart doesn’t count.) As usual, to find a bevy of borrowed concepts executed to shameless degrees, you’d have to go across the pond to lands near and far – and when I say far, I mean far, far from Hollywood’s trademark owners and rights-holders – to get a sweet, sweet taste of that Bondsploitation.

The Philippines had Weng Weng, a little person with a max height of 2’9” who starred in his own series of Bond-inspired spy spoofs, Agent 00 and its sequel For Your Height Only. (These are real.) If you follow cult movies with any regularity, then it won’t surprise you to know that India, too – alongside their own versions of Superman and even Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” – had ripped off the Bond series, this one flagrantly rubbing their unauthorized use of the brand in Hollywood’s faces with the aptly titled James Bond 777, described as “the adventures of Kishore, a ‘James Bond 777’ CBI agent, as he and heroine Sopa battle criminal mastermind ‘Boss’ and his gang which includes whip-cracking Jamilla and a trio of highly trained dogs.” Australia got in the game with the action caper The Man From Hong Kong in 1975, co-produced by Chinese financiers, and starring, ironically, Australia’s own native son George Lazenby, who famously took over for Sean Connery in the earliest days of the Bond franchise after the Scotsman demanded more money than producers were willing to pay. (Lazenby is the subject of a tremendous and unexpectedly hilarious documentary on Hulu called Becoming Bond – I can’t recommend it enough.) But leave it to Italy, king of the counterfeiters, in addition to their own versions of JAWS (Great White aka The Last Shark), Escape From New York (The Bronx Warriors), and Mad Max (The New Barbarians) to make not just their own Bond rip-off, but to actually have the audacity to cast – wait for it – Neil Connery, younger brother of Sean Connery and very much a real human being you didn’t know existed until just now. Known, hilariously, as O.K. Connery, Operation Kid Brother, and Operation Double 007, it even includes a handful of actors who had appeared in earlier James Bond films like DR. No’s Anthony Dawson and Bernard Lee to establish that the Italians were really going for it. (Interestingly, Connery’s character isn’t called James Bond or a remotely similar pseudonym, but rather “Dr. Neil Connery.”) Years later, in 1984, Kid Connery also appeared in China’s unrelated Mad Mission 3: Our Man From Bond Street for celebrated cult director Hark Tsui (Van Damme’s Knock Off and Double Team), in which “a master thief is duped by lookalikes for James Bond and the Queen of England into stealing a valuable gem from a heavily guarded location, then must help the police recover it.” Six of these movies were made between 1982 and 1997, released in China and America under the monikers Aces Go Places and Mad Mission, respectively, and while they were all spoofs of the Bond franchise, only one of them featured a Connery. Guess which brother.

Meanwhile, somewhere over in Turkey, a Frenchman named Jean-Marie Pallardy, director of softcore films like Erotic Diary and Hot Acts Of Love, was prepping his own take on the Bond concept, only this time with a twist. Buoyed by a pretension and grandiose self-importance of which only European filmmakers are capable, White Fire (aka Vivre Pour Survivre) takes the concept of an undercover superspy (Robert Ginty, The Exterminator series) and gives him…a sister (Belinda Mayne, from another Italian rip-off, Alien 2: On Earth), who gets involved with her brother’s missions. Our characters’ fates are written in the film’s very strange prologue, which feels like something James Glickenhaus would’ve directed while being Italian, as our young brother and sister witness the assassination of their parents by anonymous soldiers (one of which includes a pretty gnarly death by flamethrower, allowing for a fiery cameo from the director himself). Young Bo and his sister Ingrid (sometimes accidentally called “Inga” by people who should know better) grow up under the care of Sam (Jess Hahn, The Trial), “the American” who saved them as children on the beach. With his guidance, they become Turkey’s go-to brother-and-sister superspy team straight outta MI-6.

Just kidding! They become JEWEL THIEVES.

I know, I know, hang on – we’re getting there.

The siblings – the both of them, mind you, at least I think – inexplicably work at a diamond mine in the middle of a desert in Istanbul (which is misspelled on the opening title card). Apparently, I think, Bo and Ingrid have been stealing diamonds from their company for years and selling them to your usual collection of bad guys, only a higher-up at their company, Yilmaz (Gordon Mitchell), is both aware of this and in on it for reasons never explained.

Soon we meet the bad guys, headed by Sophia (Mirella Banti, Tenebrae), sometimes called “Sophie” by people who should know better, a fierce Italian crime lord. Or is it Barbossa (Benito Stefanelli), sometimes accidentally called Barbarossa by people who should know better, who is actually the one in charge? Or is it Paydin (???), a man who definitely exists in the movie but who doesn’t appear on IMDB or anywhere on the Internet? Yilmaz, it seems, is in cahoots with this shady trio, and has a deal to sell them the diamonds that Bo and Ingrid have been pilfering from the diamond mine. Say, why bother with all these extra steps? Why wouldn’t Yilmaz just steal the diamonds himself and cut out the middlemen? What in the good gravy of Turkey is going on in this movie?

White Fire throws an awful lot at you during the first five minutes of its present day, and frankly, if you’re not already lost at that point, I’m impressed. Is this entire diamond operation good or bad? Hell, are Bo and Ingrid good guys or bad guys? Is this one of those crime/caper flicks born from the era where you rooted for the thief, like Charley Varrick or The Getaway, or does director Pallardy fail to understand characterization? No justification is ever offered for why Bo and Inrid have chosen this line of work, but White Fire definitely wants us to sympathize with them regardless of how they ended up there.

Now, about that incest…

At some point during the movie’s making, Pallardy made the baffling choice to portray his two heroic siblings as being closer than normality allows. Adult Bo seems…a little too preoccupied with his sister. Mainly, her beauty. Mainly, her naked beauty after she climbs out of the pool following a skinny dip session, at which point he rips away her towel to get a glimpse of her fine flesh. “You’re not anybody’s kid sister anymore,” he says, his eyes trained on her naked form. “You know, it’s a pity you’re my sister,” he adds.

And boy, it’s weird.

Really, that’s just the beginning – merely a single instance that, if you wanted to, could be dismissed as one of those unfortunate translation hiccups that happens every so often in European/American co-productions (similar to how Liam Neeson’s Brian Mills seems overly possessive of his daughter in the first Taken, with his dialogue at times more appropriate for an eager young lover than his own progeny). On paper, there’s nothing “wrong” with this. American culture has always been more buttoned up than our European counterparts, right down to how we interact with our own families. They kiss their relations on the mouth; we don’t. Third generations see their grandparents with regularity and even live with them in greater numbers; we don’t. And, I guess, they leer at their naked sister and opine about how the only thing keeping their libido in check is their DNA; we…definitely don’t. (Insert typical redneck joke here.) Just the fact that most European statues and artwork portray naked subjects and ours have on thirty layers of stuffy clothing tells you everything you need to know about the difference in our cultures.

Because of how truly insane White Fire ends up getting, I don’t know if it’s a spoiler to tell you that Ingrid is attacked and killed by the flick’s requisite bad guy (well, gal) during the first act, and after Boris’s entire life ends emotionally, Sam does the only responsible thing he knows to do: he chooses a prostitute who looks like Ingrid (Diana Goodman), gets her plastic surgery, and trains her to mimic Bo’s departed sister, eventually – basically – replacing the departed Ingrid with this new model named Olga. Why Sam assumed that Bo’s fragile, compromised mind would be able to handle such a casually cold doppelganger switcheroo is part of what makes White Fire so goddamn fascinating. This isn’t Sam acting as the covert snake in the grass for some shadowy crime group; he’s not some mind-fuck genius like Hannibal Lecter putting the mental whammo on an already delicate target. This was just Sam being Sam because he honestly thought this was an okay and helpful idea; i.e., “Ah, jeeze, Bo’s sister died. I better get him a new one.” In fact, the closest to real, actual human that Sam gets with respect to his plan is that Ingrid had already been immersed in the shady goings-on of these bad guys (you know, the ones who KILLED HER), and they could use Olga, her replacement, by re-inserting her right back into the scheme and none of their progress would be wasted. Sam really wants to get rich! And I’m not postulating here, because he caps off the breakdown of his weirdo plan to Bo by saying, “We’d be rich!” Oh sure, Sam wants Bo to get over his pain, but he also wants them out of the smuggling game for good, and the fabled white diamond could be their ticket to retirement. It all hinges on Sam’s well assembled scheme (and I’ll paraphrase to make a point):

Bo: “The bad guys definitely shot a nail into Ingrid’s brain and she’s dead.”

Sam: “Let’s go for it anyway.”

So, are Sam and Bo calling the bad guys’ bluff, or do they think some other unrelated group of bad guys are the ones responsible for Ingrid’s death so it wouldn’t be weird when she came back from the dead? And, to sound as callous as Sam for a moment, why the hell do they need Ingrid or Olga at all? Are they incapable of working directly with the bad guys to offload their cache of stolen diamonds? White Fire, in its ongoing theme, never makes that clear.

At first, Bo is understandably dismissive of this plan – and not because Sam, his longtime father figure, could be so uncaring, but because his plan relies on a lazy sleight of hand no one would ever possibly believe: the bad guys would see the newly transformed Olga, believe her to be Ingrid, and think, “Huh…I guess she survived getting her brain shot with a nail…and also forgot about that time we shot her brain with a nail.” Piss off with that emotional turmoil: logistics – this is where Bo’s main focus lies. And he’s not wrong.

Things only get worse once the scheme is underway and Bo starts treating his replacement sister pretty poorly – again, not because he’s still mourning over Ingrid’s death and how dare this impostor think she could replace her, but more because Olga initially fails to know the things that Ingrid knew and do things in the same way that Ingrid used to do them. She is a poor student behind on her studies and he is the teacher who’s had it. During one pivotal moment, Olga loses her cool while trying to be Ingrid and rattles off a sarcastic remark about how she’ll never be as perfect as Bo’s “saintly sister,” leading Bo to slap her very hard in anger. (This is your reminder from me, your host, that we’re still supposed to be rooting for Bo in spite of this – that, at this moment, White Fire, almost offensively, wants us to throw our full emotional support behind the girl-slapping, sister-replacing, sex-pervert diamond thief.) It’s that moment in every romantic dramedy where the main couple, with their own traditions and rituals, break up in a highly dramatic manner, and then later, after one or both of them have met someone new, they see in real time how their replacement lovers fail at being the same person they’re trying to replace. That’s exactly what Bo experiences during the second act of White Fire, only this time, the former lover he’s trying to replace is his sister, and yep, we’re still in increasingly weirder and weirder territory, but things, somehow, get weirder still – and much, much cringier.

When Olga returns from her successful plastic surgery (which also sees the return of Belinda Mayne), Bo falls in love with her immediately. “I love you, Ingrid,” he says, holding her tightly…and Olga is totally fine with this – totally fine with throwing away her entire identity and serving as understudy to a dead girl she’s never met with whom her own brother seems to be in love. Moments later, Bo and Olga are on a boat where she is straddling him. He slowly undoes the straps on the front of her dress and caresses her bare breasts…as flashback scenes of an underage Ingrid play in his mind. (Sam’s just a few feet away in the hull during all this, by the way.) Whether Bo is being intentionally portrayed as someone finally able to embrace the realization that he’s in love with his dead sister, or through necessary movie machinations lacking those deeper implications that exist simply to drive the narrative forward, White Fire never specifically clarifies. (In real life, director Pallardy has been angrily dismissive of the incest theory, trying to pass off this conspiracy as puritanical Americanism, even pointing the finger at those who believe such a thing and insinuating maybe they’re the ones with sexual hang-ups. Granted, it’s ingrained in our culture to be weary of open sexuality, even though we use it to sell everything – from gigantic hoagies to kids’ clothes – but I’d like to think we’re on the ball enough to know what incest looks like.)

Weirder still, this new love isn’t presented as a conflict. This isn’t some kind of psychological malady on which Sam looks back and which forces him to realize he’s made a terrible decision in setting this whole thing in motion. This isn’t a moment where parables about accepting death come into play and shape the rest of the movie, leading Bo to realize there is no replacing a lost love, plutonic or otherwise. If White Fire is successful, then the audience will want this to happen because Bo deserves to be happy, and the romance that blossoms between him and Olga is meant to mirror that kind of surface-level, happy-ending love as depicted in most superficial romances. White Fire doesn’t want its audience to feel conflicted, and it doesn’t want them to think, “Oh, Bo, no! Don’t go down this road!” White Fire wants its audience, instead, to sigh wistfully and say, “Ah…good for them. They deserve love.”

If you think this is White Fire’s sole example of total insanity and reckless incompetence, you’re horribly wrong. All of White Fire is made with this kind of delusion where the siblings’ love isn’t nuts, or the good guys’ Ingrid/Olga-swapping plan isn’t absurd, or the bad guys’ schemes and double-crosses are totally clear, or the lead evil femme isn’t hilariously dubbed and very poorly portrayed, or the sought-after white diamond isn’t a totally useless subplot (considering it explodes at the end for absolutely no reason). Fred Williamson’s Noah eventually shows up as a kind of third-party complication looking for Olga, and he spends so much time in his own subplot that you become convinced White Fire is one of those situations where two unfinished films were edited together as one fully incomprehensible mish-mash. But nope! It was all part of the plan, I guess!

Right around now, you’re probably wondering, “this doesn’t sound like a James Bond rip-off at all.”

Well, strap it on, Moneypenny. The framework for your typical Bond picture is all right there in front of you. Right off the bat, Bo is Bond, and Ingrid/Olga are any number of Bond girls that have perished over the years, leaving Bond to wonder if the superspy world is for him. (In fact, the women in White Fire echo those from the Bond series: really only there to make shit much more complicated for the men, either through emotional sabotage or cloak-and-dagger duplicity, and they are almost entirely disposable.) Sam is “M,” Bond’s handler, mentor, and all-around paternal figure – the one who finds the missions, arranges the plays, sets Bo out into the criminal underworld while he stays behind and reaps the benefits. The diamond mine where the siblings work, only ever called “the organization,” looks less like an industrial mine and more like a post-apocalyptic bad-guy headquarters straight out of John Carpenter’s version of 1997’s New York, containing numerous shady rooms where people are tortured and executed, and where its armed guards have hilariously oversized helmets worn by the likes of Rick Moranis in Spaceballs. You’ve got the international bad guys, the espionage, the double-crosses, the triple-crosses, the sporadic fight scenes, the quippy one-liners. You’ve got the third-party frenemy in Noah, who seems like a bad guy, and possibly is a bad guy, but maybe ends up being a good guy because he helps the “siblings” out of a jam. You’ve got “the mission,” which is stealing the white fire diamond – a diamond so dangerous that it scorches the flesh of anyone who touches it – and you’ve also got what the movie is really about, which is who the hell knows? You guys, there’s a part where a hapless schmuck is tied down to an industrial table saw that inches closer and closer to his balls akin to the infamous laser beam scene from Goldfinger, only this time the poor slob doesn’t make it off the table. And if THAT wasn’t enough, you’ve got the goddamn TITULAR MOVIE’S THEME SONG.

White Fire is a mystery, and for so many reasons, chief among them: where did this movie come from? How is it possible that so many movies, either from the golden era of bad cinema (the ‘80s) like Chopping Mall or Pieces, or from the modern age like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room or James Nguyen’s Birdemic or anything Neil Breen has ever directed, can be celebrated for their turdiness, but meanwhile, something so deliciously stupid as White Fire has gone unwhispered about on street corners like the anti-Candyman? But okay, fine – sometimes movies get lost for a long time and then come roaring back, so we can put that aside and focus on the question that truly matters: WHAT is going ON in this MOVIE? Can anyone tell me? Because I’ve spent three thousand words trying to lay it all out in order and it still doesn’t make a lick of sense. 

White Fire exists in its own world and lives by its own rules, where characters repeat lines of dialogue that should’ve been removed in the editing room, offering the impression that every character has obsessive compulsive disorder. White Fire is the kind of movie where Fred Williamson carries an unlit cigar at all times, even in scenes when he’s shielding himself from gunfire and moments from death (and you just know this was Williamson’s idea: sacrifice a tiny bit more realism in exchange for looking “cool”). White Fire is the kind of movie that depicts a normally icky place like a plastic surgery clinic as a haven for girls to wander around half-naked wearing colored togas like goddesses on Mount Olympus. And oh yeah, White Fire is the kind of movie where the girl-slapping good guy wants to bang his sister but then she gets a nail shot into her brain and dies so he finds a replacement and she gets plastic surgery to look like his dead sister and then he bangs her instead.

Honestly, cataloging and transcribing all of White Fire’s irrationality is an impossible task and I’m doing you a disservice by trying; instead, you need to experience it for yourself, because along with all the crazy, it’s entertaining as hell. It hits the ground running with rampant stupidity and never lets up. From literal chainsaw fights to haphazard car chases to unflinching giallo-like violence, White Fire is non-stop, and if the plot starts to feel like it’s not coalescing in your Bond-proofed brain, don’t give a fuck because it wouldn’t make sense no matter who was looking. If you like cheesy ‘80s action flicks, European curiosities, so-bad-it’s-good trash classics, overly dramatic Italian-style quick-zooms, or another title to watch during your Robert Ginty fan club meetings, White Fire is here to make you say, “Oh, brother – I love you.”

Luckily for you, it’s now available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.