This world can really make it tough on a tough guy who tries to maintain his non-violent stance. What with your pregnant old lady getting stabbed in the guts and your friend getting himself ass raped in the secret arctic fight-to-the-death club you’ve both been kidnapped to and forced to participate in, it is perhaps understandable that you’re eventually going to be beating the piss out of guys, throwing prison shanks into their backs and making sure it’s them who blow up and not you.

To his credit (and the audience’s consternation) Professor John Stoneman spends most of Fatal Combat (aka No Exit) trying to reason with all the killers and psychos he comes across, babbling unconvincingly that there can be a different path other than violence. (That Stoneman is played by karate expert Jeff Wincott who starred in such films as Open Fire and The Killing Machine serves to only make his scenes teaching a college class on how to avoid committing violence all the more delightfully ludicrous.) Continue reading “Fatal Combat (1995)” →

As the bandages were slowly unfurled from the face of the mystery man at the beginning of The Killing Machine (aka The Killing Man), I was at once fearful and transfixed. Fearful of what hideous burned up visage waited to be unveiled, yet transfixed because I just had to know what the Killing Machine looked like! Would his face look like shredded hamburger? Would his charred skull peek through chunks of sizzled flesh? Would he need a really bad toupee like Claude Raines in The Invisible Man? Continue reading “The Killing Machine (1994)” →

Elitist fancy pants action movie fans routinely dismiss Open Fire as merely “Die Hard in a chemical plant”. True scholars of the bargain bin late 1980s and 1990s direct to video action movie shelf fillers know that Open Fire is actually Deadly Outbreak but with a brown haired guy who kicks people in the face instead of a black haired guy doing it. Continue reading “Open Fire (1994)” →