Delta Force 3: The Killing Game (1991)

Delta Force 3: The Killing Game (1991)- * *

Directed by: Sam Firstenberg

Starring: Eric Douglas, Nick Cassavettes, Matthew Penn, Mike Norris, Hanna Hasfari, Jonathan Cherchi, and John P Ryan

Wouldn't ya just know it, now there's a new terrorist on the block, an insane homicidal madman named Kahlil Kadal (Cherchi). Evidently, he has a real beef with Miami, Florida and he wants to blow it up with a nuclear device. His motivation for just exactly why he wants to do this is never truly explained, although Miami Vice did go off the air two years before Kadal went nutso, so maybe that's what hacked him off so badly. It's really anybody's guess. 

The only logical way to counteract Kadal, so believes the President (of the United States) is to call in The Delta Force. Charlie (Cassavetes), Sam (Douglas), Richard (Penn) and Greg (Norris) - to avoid further confusion that's Nick, Eric, Matthew, and Mike, respectively - join forces with some Russians, Sergei (Ryan) (of COURSE his name is Sergei), and Irenia (Hasfari). Will the combined forces of the DELTA FORCE, a Russian, and a woman be enough to thwart Kadal's nefarious plans? And who will win THE KILLING GAME?....and what is THE KILLING GAME?



So, yes, there is a third installment in the Delta Force series, and no, it does not feature Chuck Norris. It does feature Mike Norris, so the Norris quota is satisfied. Apparently, Chuck was going to be involved with the project but he backed out at some point. Much like Death Ring (1992) (which also starred Mike Norris), with its infamous box cover touting the appearances of "SWAYZE - NORRIS - McQUEEN", it appears that Delta Force 3: The Killing Game is throwing in all its chips with the idea of featuring celebrity sons in the main roles.



While Nick Cassavetes and Matthew Penn kind of fade into the rest of the Israeli scenery, Eric Douglas explodes off the screen with a somehow-recognizable je ne sais quoi. Director Sam Firstenberg did two things right with DF3:TKG - One, he made Islamic terrorists the focus and not some nebulous, politically-correct threat. This predates Path to Paradise (1997) by quite a few years, and Homeland by many more. Two, he gave Eric Douglas plenty of screen time. His Jerry Trimble-esque antics liven things up. Whenever he's around Douglasin' it up, the movie improves.




The idea of the U.S. and Russia working together was a hot new idea at the time, fresh off the Berlin Wall falling. Of course, there are tensions at first (along with a silly training sequence), but, of course, this "Delta Force 2.0" (or should we say Delta Force 3.0) joins forces to combat the real threat facing both nations. Naturally, after training is complete and the battle begins, there is plenty of punching, kicking, shooting, blow-ups, and a very rapid-fire string of underground bombs (?) that are not far off from underground ninjas. Which in themselves are not far off from Bugs Bunny.




But, sad to say, there are issues here that put a damper on things. The middle section drags, and, as in a lot of Firstenberg films, there is no character development whatsoever. We never really get to know or become emotionally invested in our heroes. Sure, there are a lot of "war heroics" (what war is this again?), but what does it all mean when the characters we're spending our time with are one-dimensional? Yes, I know we're talking about Delta Force 3 here, but I still don't think that's an entirely unreasonable request. But, to counterbalance all that, we do get some funny death noises from the people that do expire, which sound a lot like satisfied grunts. It's hard to know whether they've died violently or have just eaten a large meal.


DF3:TKG doesn't really "feel" like the prior Delta Force films, it kind of feels like its own thing. Despite its lack of perfection, it's still probably worth seeing if you enjoyed the first two Delta Force entries.

Comeuppance Review by: Ty and Brett

The Octagon (1980)

The Octagon (1980)-* *1\2

Directed by: Eric Karson

Starring: Chuck Norris, Karen Carlson, Ernie Hudson, Richard Norton, Mike Norris, Gerald Okamura, Tadashi Yamashita,  John Barrett, John Fujioka, and Lee Van Cleef










Scott James (Chuck) is a man who looks spiffy on the outside (he wears a pretty sweet tuxedo) but seems to have a lot of turmoil on the inside. Not only is he constantly flashing back to his childhood and his initial Martial Arts training (the young Scott is played by Mike Norris), but the voices in his head are overpowering and seem to tell him important things. All this is going to come in handy when Scott James faces off against perhaps the ultimate foe: terrorist ninjas. Yes, terrorist ninjas. 

While protecting a woman named Justine (Carlson) from said TerNin’s - which he does with the help of mentor McCarn (Van Cleef) - he realizes the true depth of what he’s up against. The nefarious group trains in an octagon-shaped facility, and their organization is named...The Octagon. Will Scott James triumph over these squares? Find out today!

While The Octagon contains no cage fighting, or Punchfighting of any kind, it is in fact a reasonable Chuck movie. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. By today’s standards, the pace might be too slow for some viewers, and at 104 minutes it’s certainly on the long side. But what else would you expect from director Karson, who later was responsible for Van Damme dud Black Eagle (1988)? But the cast perhaps makes up for it. Besides the aforementioned Norrises, and of course the legendary Lee Van Cleef, we have Tadashi Yamashita of Sword of Heaven (1985) fame, whose hair steals his own performance out from under him. 

The great Gerald Okamura has a brief role as a member of The Octagon, as does John Fujioka, and John Barrett does stunts as well as a small role. There’s even a young Ernie Hudson on board as a fighter. As is usual for a Chuck movie, Aaron Norris was stunt coordinator, and besides doing stunts, Richard Norton has a nice appearance as a baddie who gets in a fight with Chuck.

Norton’s hair and mustache combo look awesome, and his blonde bowl haircut is so bright, it actually lights an entire dark scene all on its own. But back to Chuck, this movie definitely belongs to the era in his acting career where his performances were noticeably, obviously wooden. Or, WoodChuck for short. But beyond the fact that this is a WoodChuck movie, at least you can hear his thoughts, which is enlightening. There’s a passing mention that Scott James was a Vietnam vet, and the baddies’ training camp is seems like a dry run for the later American Ninja (1985) - which would also reunite Norton, Yamashita and Fujioka.

The Octagon is competently-made early-80’s Chuck, but better was yet to come.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

Survival Game (1987)

Survival Game (1987)-*1\2

Directed by: Herb Freed

Starring: Mike Norris, Ed Bernard, Deborah Goodrich, and Seymour Cassel










 Mike Hawkins (Mike Norris, in what is perhaps a Tony Danza-like situation where he can only play guys named Mike to avoid being confused) is a young adult who loves nothing more than to hang out at “War In Peace Survival Camp” and stage mock battles, wars and “survival games”. Even the founder of WIPSC, a man inexplicably named Sugar Bear, who was in “Nam with Mike‘s dad (Bernard), keeps telling Mike to make more of himself and go to college. That’s also what his parents tell him. But Mike just wants to keep on Survival Gamin’.

Meanwhile, Dave Forrest (Cassel) gets out of prison after 17 years. Forrest is a man after the fashion of Timothy Leary - a 60’s-era guru who invented an LSD-like drug called “Forrest Fire”. All he wants to do is talk to his poster of Jimi Hendrix and just chill with some good vibes, man. But his daughter C.J. (Goodrich) gets into a car accident with Mike, and the two of them end up going on the run because some evil gangsters are convinced the Forrest family has a multi-million dollar stash of drug money. So they kidnap Dave and C.J., and only one man with the proper survival skills can save them from the gangsters...MIKE HAWKINS!

Survival Game is very dumb, and has frighteningly little action. What action there is happens to be pretty goofy indeed. It seems this whole venture was cooked up as a cash-in to the Norris name in the go-go 80’s. 

We actually like Mike Norris, this isn’t a slam on him, but this movie is pretty half-baked. It becomes an uninspiring hostage drama at a certain point and the pace slacks big time. What this movie needed was to ramp up the action, violence and intensity. It seems director Herb Freed was unfamiliar with the techniques of action cinema at the time. Though this movie was released in ‘87, his next movie after this one was Subterfuge (1996), the Matt McColm non-classic. Subterfuge is more entertaining than this, but that should still tell you something.

Perhaps in keeping with the 60’s-era characters like Dave Forrest, there are plenty of songs on the soundtrack from that time. The Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” makes an appearance, but you truly haven’t heard “Louie Louie” until you’ve heard it as the background music while Mike Norris runs through a department store in true “Scooby Doo” style. The song plays in its entirety, no less. Getting every penny out of it, apparently. 

As for the original music, there’s a theme that sounds EXACTLY like “Axel F”. Harold Faltermeyer should sue. But hey, it was the 80’s. It was a different time. A time when carbon-copy action movies with carbon-copy music hit video store shelves and no one complained and life was good. If the theme of this movie is nostalgia, it truly has come full circle.

Released by Media, it’s hard to truly throw our weight behind Survival Game, but its inoffensive, bland quasi-entertainment might appeal to someone.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

Ripper Man (1995)

Ripper Man (1995)-* *1\2

Directed by: Phil Sears

Starring: Mike Norris, Timothy Bottoms, Bruce Locke, Sofia Shinas, George "Buck" Flower, and Charles Napier












Mike Lazo (Norris) is a former San Diego cop who decides to try his hand at becoming a nightclub hypnotist. The club manager where he works, Harry (Napier), is sympathetic towards him, as is cocktail waitress Gena (Shinas), but for Lazo his act just isn’t coming together. One day a mysterious man named Charles Walkan (Bottoms) asks Lazo to hypnotize him. While under hypnosis, Walkan seemingly becomes a man named George Chapman, a man thought to be Jack the Ripper. Soon, Walkan/Chapman is off on a killing spree, but all of Lazo’s former buddies on the police force don’t believe the “he became a serial killer under hypnosis” theory, and to boot, they blame the killings on Lazo! So now Lazo must clear his good name and take down Walkan. Or Chapman. Or whoever he happens to be that day. Can he do it?

Ripper Man is a bit of a different role for Mike Norris. It’s a blessing and a curse: on the one hand, it’s good to be different every once in a while. But on the other hand, it seems like certain things are missing. There’s almost no Martial Arts (but we didn’t expect there to be any in a movie called Ripper Man) - but there are some cop movie cliches. Probably the movie highlight was the shootout in the hospital. That was an action scene. The rest of the movie is pretty much your standard mid-90’s thriller, despite the fact that it tries to be a little more intelligent at first. Despite, at the outset, trying to inject some smarts, it soon devolves into a standard cat-and-mouse kind of situation and all the pretenses are out the window.

As for the rest of the cast, Timothy Bottoms, sporting a sillier-than-usual haircut, looks like a cross between Kevin Kline, Steve Guttenberg and George W. Bush. And normally he just looks like George W. Bush. He’s even played “W” numerous times. His Lone Tiger (1999) co-star Bruce Locke - yes, Kurenai himself! - appears as a San Diego cop and friend to Lazo. It was nice to see him again. It’s funny to think he did this and Lone Tiger back to back. Charles Napier is under-used, as is George “Buck” Flower. It’s director Phil Sears’ only film to date. It’s almost a shame, really, because our guess is that video store patrons in the mid-90’s didn’t really give this movie much of a chance. Not that they’re missing all that much, but somehow this got lost in the shuffle and we feel just a tad bit bad about it. No one ever talks about Ripper Man (and how they never saw it). It should at least go in the cultural lexicon. Maybe somewhere towards the back.

Maybe it was the title, maybe Mike Norris scared people off, but no one seems to have seen Ripper Man. We can’t suggest you expend really any effort on finding this VHS, but if you happen to see it cheap somewhere, it can’t hurt too much to add it to your collection.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

Born American (1986)

Born American (1986)-* *1\2

Directed By: Renny Harlin

Starring: Mike Norris, Thalmus Rasulala, and Albert Salmi








"Freedom is just a word....Until you lose it."





In the 80's, there was glut of movies about the conflict between America and Russia. Some notable examples include: Red Dawn (1984), Russkies (1987), Red Heat (1988), and later there was Armstrong (1998) with the classic tagline: "The Cold War is heating up..."

Oft-forgotten among these more well-known titles, is Born American. This time around, three American party dudes, Savoy Brown (Norris), Mitch (Steve Durham), and K.C. (David Coburn), rather than go to a warm, tropical climate, decide to drink beer and enact their wacky shenanigans on the snow-filled border between Finland and Russia.

Sure, everything is going swell between their sessions of shooting their giant bow & arrow at playing cards and doing the limbo under the actual border, but for a fun time prank, Savoy decides it would be a real hoot to cross over some barbed wire and some armed guard towers into Russian territory.



Unfortunately, after a mix up or two involving the humongous bow & arrow, now the whole town is after them. The gang is taken in for questioning and the evil warden thinks they are a terrorist group. So they are thrown into prison. The place is a rat-infested hellhole and K.C. is injured and slowly dying. Luckily, there is "The Admiral" (Rasulala), a friendly American who lives in the basement of the prison and works for the C.I.A.



It all comes to a head when the gang is forced into a deadly game of human chess that involves some light punchfighting. Will Savoy and his buddies escape the prison with their life intact?

Just imagine a cross between the aforementioned Red Dawn and Midnight Express (1978). Norris later of Death Ring (1992) fame does a non-silly (as opposed to later in his career) job as Savoy. He even yells not once, not twice, but three fan favorite yells: "NOOOOOOooo!" He also has the prerequisite training sequence before the big human chess match. There are some rocket launcher blow-ups that are welcome.


The problems are: the movie takes itself way too seriously. Also it is hard to feel bad for the gang because they are in this predicament because of their own stupid decisions.

All in all, Born American is a decent addition to the 80's-movie-fascination-with-the-cold-war-with-Russia boom.


Comeuppance Review by: Ty & Brett

Death Ring (1992)

Death Ring (1992)-* * *

Directed By: R.J. Kizer

Starring: Mike Norris, Chad McQueen,  Isabel Glasser, Billy Drago, and Don Swayze














From the director of Hell Comes To Frogtown (1988) comes Death Ring, a movie that, despite the impressive B-movie cast, could have used the talents of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper.

In this complete and total knockoff of The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Mike Norris portrays local lunkhead Matt Collins, an ex-Special Forces soldier who can’t find his place in the world. So he spends his time competing in events such as “The Survival Of The Fittest” competition.

In this unexplainably televised event, which is a cross between rock-climbing and Army basic training, bored (really bored) evil rich dude Danton Vachs (great name) (Drago) (another great name) sees Collins and kidnaps him, as well as his girlfriend Lauren (Glasser),  who were trying to spend a lovely day at the batting cages. Luckily, “Skylord” Harris (McQueen) witnesses the whole thing before being knocked unconscious by Vachs’ goons. Did we mention his name was SKYLORD HARRIS? Because his name is Skylord Harris.

Skylord is now on the case trying to track down his best friend Matt. Little does Skylord know, they have been spirited away to a creepy island and Collins is forced to play “The Most Dangerous Game” with a multi-racial group of hunters: a Mexican, an American Indian, an Asian, and an Italian. They all go about hunting Collins in their own ethnic-stereotyped ways. When Collins dispatches a man named Mr. Chin, in a flash of brilliance, he posthumously re-dubs him “Mr. Dead”.

Vachs has a control panel set-up so he can communicate with his minions while they hunt Collins. (Also so Collins can spit snappy one-liners to Vachs while deep in the woods.) Vachs' minions also drink snake blood and the titular “Death Ring” is a real piece of jewelry worn by Vachs.

Exactly one hour into the film, we finally get our first “Swayze Sighting”. Don plays John Blackwell, a leftover from Vachs’ previous hunting party. He and Collins team up to get revenge. After searching one tattoo parlor named “Tattoo”, Skylord sees the design of two overlapping triangles (like they are fast-forwarding their wrists) he remembers at the time of the kidnapping.



We won’t give away the ending, but let’s just say it involves a “fan favorite death” and heads are gonna roll!

Basically playing the same role as he did in execrably fun Money To Burn (1996) with fellow castmate Don Swayze, we can only surmise that McQueen himself is a man dead-set against sleeves of any kind. Including his car, which is a jeep. Doors are too close to sleeves for this guy! It is “death before sleeves!” as Skylord sleevelessly saves the day in his rockin’ helicopter.

This “New generation of action stars” (as the box only lists their last names, as if that would fool potential renters) is really close to “Lone Tiger” syndrome: where a movie that is chock full of B-movie favorites does not guarantee a good movie. That being said, “Death Ring” is basic stupid action fun.

It predates the very similar but more popular Surviving The Game (1994) by two years. Death Ring was first!

The end credits admonish you to not just “read the novel”, but in what has to be a movie first, to “eat the popcorn”. If anyone out there has read the official Death Ring novel or eaten the official Death Ring popcorn, please write in today.


Comeuppance Review by: Ty and Brett