Category: Action

Flood! (1976)

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The forecast for Brownsville is disaster! With a chance for various faces familiar to 1970s audiences to drown as a combination of murky model work and stock footage unleash a watery hell on the sleepy town renowned for its fishing and hotshot helicopter pilots!

As they are introduced one by one, the tension rises like the water behind the wimpy earthen dam, as you try to guess who will be swept away, inevitably prompting pained reaction shots from the survivors! (Don’t be sad – they’ll turn up again with guest spots on The Love Boat or Fantasy Island!) Continue reading “Flood! (1976)” →

Interceptor Force 2 (2002)

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Interceptor Force is back! And this time they’re actually called Interceptor Force! Well, most of the time, the mission is so apocalyptic the chief of Interceptor Force just calls it I-Force because there just isn’t time for those extra three syllables!

There’s also no time to inform the viewer much about what exactly I-Force is. It’s lucky then that the I-Force HQ (a room with people milling around PC workstations with cheesy shaped monitors) has a giant seal affixed to the wall that says “The Final Line of Defense.” That doesn’t really explain anything of course but it does confirm that any slogan on a seal really ought to be in Latin for maximum effect. Continue reading “Interceptor Force 2 (2002)” →

Interceptor Force (1999)

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Earth is under assault from an almost invincible alien presence! The United States government is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the world, by launching a nuclear strike against the aliens! Only one group of specially trained ass kickers can prevent this holocaust from happening! They are the Interceptor Force!

Unfortunately it turns out that Interceptor Force is made up of Olivier Gruner and a couple of other guys you don’t know! And they aren’t trained to battle outer space monsters, they’re just mercenaries! And they aren’t even called Interceptor Force! But then again, the alien invasion is actually taking place in Mexico, so the U.S. is really going to make the ultimate sacrifice on Mexico’s behalf when they nuke them! Hey, it wasn’t like we told the aliens to land in Mexico or anything! Continue reading “Interceptor Force (1999)” →

Target of Opportunity (2005)

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We’ve all been there. A special ops goes sideways, the enemy one step ahead of us and cutting through our unit like a buzzsaw, only leaving one or two guys left alive to reminisce/be haunted/get revenge for it years later.

While it is sad that all those guys on the team we didn’t even know got shot and blown up, it provides our heroes a much needed bonding experience that can be referenced and exploited throughout the rest of the film. And in best case scenarios like in Target of Opportunity, it allows for our heroes to develop a trademark gimmick such as the fist bump they do while talking about never leaving the other behind. Damn, these dudes are more in love than me and my wife! Continue reading “Target of Opportunity (2005)” →

Urban Warriors (1987)

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What took man centuries to build, Italian film director Giuseppe Vari takes seconds to destroy through a barrage of mushroom cloud stock footage! Even more terrifying is that Vari apparently got a buy one, get one free deal on stock footage because he follows up his mushroom clouds with shots of volcanoes erupting!

There’s no need to fret though that he’s going to use the volcanoes to do something silly like having Earth overrun by lava monsters. Vari knows that what will happen following an apocalyptic nuclear war is an immediate rise in the population of mutant biker gangs! Continue reading “Urban Warriors (1987)” →

A Man Called Rage (1984)

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It’s really like any other post-apocalypse. It begins with all manner of stock footage depicting modern life and mushroom clouds right down to the same shots of houses being blown away in an atomic blast we’ve seen since they were first shot in the 1960s by the US government.

And then it’s time for Director Tonino Ricci to bring his uniquely personal vision to the aftermath! A personal vision that looks like a Cirio H. Santiago movie (think endless shots of rock strewn desert), but without all the colorful mutants, midgets, and guys dressed up like they were into Mad Max cosplay. In short, the terrifying unimaginative (and by extension, quite budget friendly) vision we saw from Tonino the year before in his film Rush! But now we’ve upgraded our hero from a bad ass named Rush to a raging bad ass named Rage! Continue reading “A Man Called Rage (1984)” →

Rush (1983)

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This post-apocalypse is brought to you by big ass belt buckles! Foregoing the usual Italian Mad Max ripoff accoutrements such as spiked shoulder pads and metal studded codpieces, Rush takes a less ostentatious approach by having Rush’s wasteland edition leather pants sturdily secured by a belt buckle roughly the size of the bloody mutant rat Rush cringes at upon seeing.

Initially you admire this subtle approach the film takes versus more flamboyant Italian dishes such as Exterminators of the Year 3000, The New Barbarians, 2020 Texas Gladiators and 2019: After the Fall of New York. As the film progresses though, you begin to suspect that what’s happening isn’t because of a sudden attack of artistic restraint on the part of director Tonino Ricci (Raiders of the Magic Ivory, Days of Hell so much as the grim reality of financial constraint.

Continue reading “Rush (1983)” →