Jungle Heat (1985)

 

Jungle Heat (1985)- * *1\2

Directed by: Jobic Wong

Starring: Sam Jones and Mei Sheng Fan

In the waning days of the Vietnam war (presumably around 1975 or so but it's never said specifically) the American forces evidently need truck drivers for supply runs. Maybe it's because of all the previous casualties, but they can't find any drivers. So a ragtag team is assembled and quickly trained. The head of the New Truck Driver Training Unit, which is presumably what this endeavor is called, is Gordon (Jones). After some training, which is brief by Army standards but lengthy by movie-viewing standards, the guys are sent off into the deadly jungles of 'Nam. Many obstacles are thrown in their way, but none are more challenging than the head baddie (played by Mei Sheng Fan of Story of Ricky and Attrition fame), a sadistic torturer. Some kidnappings, shootings, blow-ups, truck chases, and other exploding-hut-esque activities follow, and it's all capped off by a bizarre motorbike competition to see who can skid under a logging truck. Maybe the JUNGLE HEAT is getting to us all...


When the first shot of any film is a framed picture of Richard Nixon on the wall, which then zooms out so the dialogue and and action can begin, you know you're in for a good time. Well, some of the time. Not this time. But still, it was a wacky start and there are some noteworthy things about the largely lackluster Jungle Heat.


It helps if you're a Sam Jones fan. He brings some interest and life to the proceedings, his classic spiky brush cut towering over the other, smaller-in-stature and less-stylishly-coiffed cast. Unfortunately, his voice is dubbed just like everyone else in the film, and if you know Sam Jones's voice, as we all do, the overdubbed voice he was given seems to not be a fit. Those loud, no-subtlety, nattering voices that seemed all the rage at this time are punishing on the ears. They make the explosions and gunfire sound like Barry White by comparison.


Jones was also a truck driver in Driving Force (1989), so he was familiar with plots involving...truck driving. It may not be the most thrilling way to kick off an action film, but it's all in the execution. Sadly, Jungle Heat doesn't focus on execution (unless you count some unlucky POW's). The film just lazily goes from incident to incident, winding and babbling like the Mekong river itself. This lax and basically structureless approach to plotting is similar to Karate Warrior 6 (1993): something happens, then something else happens, then maybe something else, but there's no continuity or "glue" holding it all together. Maybe this flies in some countries, but to our American eyes it just seems boneless and blobby.


Adding to the negatives column, there are huge swathes of time where Sam Jones is absent. However, as indicated earlier, it's not a total loss: There's a classic silly barfight to watch out for, and some of the violence is pretty wicked, including a standout gore moment that was appreciated, but seems tonally out of whack with the rest of the goings-on. We always mention "PT", or Prerequisite Torture, which, in a post-Rambo world, was, well, prerequisite for these lower-budgeted productions. They needed an inexpensive way to stand out and that was how they chose to do it. Jungle Heat takes it a bit far, with more torture than its Mercs-box-set/When-The-Vietnam-War-Raged-In-The-Philippines competitors, even making its main baddie not simply a baddie, but a huge torture fan.


Also of note is that the bald guy on the good guys (?) team was apparently named Mazo, but all we heard was "Matzoh". The idea that an East Asian warrior man would be named Matzoh is so unbelievably absurd that you just have to laugh. Or maybe not. I hear he's a big hit at Passover Seders.


There is a rare movie that, as of this writing, we're looking for: Jungle Heat (AKA Rapid Fire) from 1988. It has Cynthia Rothrock, George Chung, Leo Fong, Chuck Jeffreys, and Richard Norton. Based on the cast alone, it's probably better than this film of the same name from '85. There are also other movies called Jungle Heat out there: one dates all the way back to 1927, another from 1957, and one from 1983, which is also called Dance of the Dwarfs and stars Peter Fonda and Deborah Raffin. Just to avoid any confusion, the one under discussion today was directed by Jobic Wong (which sounds more like an argument over a pen: "That ain't Jobic, that's my Bic!").


In the end, if you like movies like War Camp or maybe even Dog Tags, you may be able to wring some entertainment value out of the rag that is Jungle Heat. Sam Jones has done better, and there are far more explosive and entertaining entries in the Exploding Hut genre, such as Mannigan's Force or Commander. Maybe go with those instead, unless you're on a quest to see every Jungle film of all time.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

Lethal Ninja (1992)

 

Lethal Ninja (1992)- * *

Directed by: Yossi Wein 

Starring: Ross Kettle, Karyn Hill, Norman Coombes, David Webb, and Ken Gampu

Joe Ford (Kettle) is some sort of cross between an art teacher and a yoga instructor who teaches "creation by meditation". Naturally, he lives in San Francisco. When he gets word that his wife Dominique (Hill) has been kidnapped, he goes to see his buddy Brannigan (Webb), and the two men go to Lake Oduba in Africa where she's being held. Kray (Coombes), the man who took her, claims he needs her for her "microbiology skills". Because her scientific encampment was besieged by ninjas, Ford and Webb decide they need to fight ninja with ninja and they become ninjas themselves, which is apparently something you can do overnight. Somehow tied into all this silliness is a Nostradamus prophecy. Will things get salty as Kettle chips away at the baddies?


The Ninja Boom meets the Africa slog in this lackluster outing. At first, we were excited to see a man named Ross Kettle be the imposing LETHAL NINJA that we see on the Vidmark box cover. Very quickly, disappointment set in when we saw how boring and lifeless it all is. It's like a lot of Yossi Wein/Nu Image movies. There are no interesting characters, dialogue, plot developments, or ideas - except for one, which we'll mention shortly. Even the time-honored barfight (at a place called New York Disco) is only about 30 seconds long.


In 1992, when Lethal Ninja came out, the American Ninja series was still very popular in video stores. But Wein and Nu Image failed to recreate that Cannon magic. Getting a guy who looks like Michael Pare (Kettle) and a guy who looks like Steve James (Webb) - not to mention a baddie that looks like Malcolm McDowell (Coombes) just wasn't enough. 

Like in a lot of other Africa-shot movies, they got Ken Gampu, which is usually a good thing, but his screen time is extremely limited. Unfortunately, the main star and lead of the movie, Ross Kettle, is a charismaless personality vacuum. He looks almost exactly like Michael Pare, but makes Pare look like Regis Philbin by comparison in the energy department. You might say Kettle is sub-Pare. It seems the filmmakers made every wrong decision. Except one...


There is exactly one good idea in Lethal Ninja. I've got the two words you've been waiting your whole life to hear: rollerskating ninjas.



That's right, at one point Joe (the same first name as Dudikoff in the aforementioned American Ninja series) goes into a warehouse and is encircled by a gaggle of dudes in ninja pajamas skating all around him. Their skates have blades that jut out from the sides. Think Xanadu (1980) meets ninjas. Amazingly, even this fantastic innovation isn't really capitalized upon. They just skate around him for a few minutes and there's no big blowout fight. They even managed to screw that up. But for a while it was really cool.



Throughout the film, things perk up whenever there is a ninja attack. I'm not sure why they didn't think of this at the time, but there should have been more ninja attacks. Besides the brief barfight, other cliches include some exploding huts and a Prerequisite Torture scene of the heroes. Interestingly, this time around, Kettle is held above a rectangular vat of boiling oil. Just like you would do with a potato chip. Could this be a coincidence?


Not to be confused with the David Heavener outing Lethal Ninja (1991) AKA For Hire, this Lethal Ninja is basically the same movie as Danger Zone (1996)...but with ninjas. The whole thing is very plain and lacks excitement or thrills. It's ultimately an empty kettle. We doubt Lethal Ninja will be your kettle of fish.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

Also check out reviews from our buddies, DTVC and The Video Vacuum!

Broken Bars (1995)

Broken Bars (1995)- * *

Directed by: Tom Neuwirth

Starring: Benjamin Kobby, Joe Estevez, Donald Gibb, and Wings Hauser








At Trabuco Federal Prison in Los Angeles, bad stuff is goin' down. A corrupt warden named Pitt (Wings) forces the inmates to Punchfight for his own amusement. If they agree to do this, he rewards them with in-cell delivery of prostitutes, strippers, drugs, and, presumably, cigarettes. He's helped along in all of this by his C.O./henchman, Mr. Jake (Gibb). If anyone disobeys Pitt in any way - including refusing to Punchfight - he spikes their heroin with poison and tosses them away.

Wanting to get to the bottom of the goings-on in Trabuco, Jack Dillon (Estevez) of the F.A.C.T. special ops division (don't ask what it stands for, as it was never said...or if it was, we missed it) sends in his best man: Nick Slater (Kobby). The taciturn Slater then proceeds to either fight or make friends with a series of stereotypes...er...I mean, inmates, until the eventual final showdown with Pitt. Won't anyone reform our criminal justice system?

Broken Bars is nothing if not a parade of men with questionable hair punching the snot out of each other. If that's what you're after (and why wouldn't you be?) then this is the movie for you. An alarming amount of the prison population in 'Bars is ponytailed and shirtless. Or some combination thereof. There are more ponytails per capita in this movie than in an episode of My Little Pony.

All that being said, Broken Bars follows the prison-Punchfighter template pretty much to the letter with no surprises in store. Bloodfist III (1992), Death Warrant (1990) and In Hell (2003) are classic examples. Van Damme is usually involved in some way.

Wings, as he usually does, brings a lot of charisma and command to his performance, and he tries mightily to save an otherwise bog-standard outing, as our friends from the UK might say. With his military uniform and close-cropped blonde hair, he really made us see how much he looks like Guile from Street Fighter. Surely not coincidentally, that's yet another Van Damme connection. 

Fan favorite Donald Gibb also stands out as a cast member who is trying. But, as Death Warrant had a clear-cut evil baddie like The Sandman, and Broken Bars has no such character, it starts to flounder a bit without that focus.

The production company Gun For Hire was behind both this and Enter The Blood Ring (1995), and we noticed some similarities between the two films. Both starred Benjamin Kobby and both featured a ringleader character of some sort who sits in a chair and watches people punchfight. 

In this case it's Wings Hauser, in the other film it's Robert Z'Dar. Evidently, the people at GFH thought this was an incredibly winning formula, but as it turned out, Broken Bars and Enter The Blood Ring are two of the rarest Punchfighters of the 90's. 'Bars barely eked out a VHS release here in America on the York Entertainment label. 1995 was a banner year for Gun For Hire, though.

It's all very much like an episode of Renegade - a ponytailed hero rides into our lives on his motorcycle while blues guitar wails on the soundtrack. There's also the Prerequisite Torture of the hero, among other clichés we all know and love. We do credit the filmmakers for adding some gratuitous female nudity, because without that, we'd be looking at an all-male cast for 95 minutes, and they must have figured that wouldn't go over well with what is probably an all-male viewership.

Broken Bars certainly won't win any points for originality (except maybe for the title, which we're still trying to figure out), but as a semi-lost video store artifact, it has some value. The only problem is that it struggles to hold our full interest for the entire running time. Those two factors pendulumed back and forth for us, as it surely will for you too.

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty

Shadow Warriors: Assault On Death Mountain (1999)

Shadow Warriors: Assault On Death Mountain (1999)- * *1\2

Directed by: Jon Cassar

Starring: Hulk Hogan, Carl Weathers, Shannon Tweed, and Martin Kove

Mike McBride (Hulk), Roy Brown (Weathers), Hunter Wiley (Tweed), and possibly some other guy are the SHADOW WARRIORS. They’re a team of mercenaries, but they’re good mercenaries who rescue kidnapped children and fight terrorists. But that’s only, in true A-Team fashion, “if you can find them”. Tasked with fighting some baddies with chemical weapons and ballistic missiles, our Shadow Warrior team snaps into action. They even enlist the help of their buddy Andy Powers (Kove), sort of an auxiliary Shadow Warrior. The only problem is McBride was injected with some sort of poison and is slowly dying. Can he get an antidote in time? Will they stop the launch of the missile? Will they save the children? WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN?!?!



Shadow Warriors: Assault On Death Mountain is a made-for-TV (TNT to be exact) outing, and you can really feel it. It feels like a pilot for a show that was never picked up, and it would have been (and should have been) a syndicated series that would air after Xena or Hercules or Relic Hunter on channel 9 on Saturday afternoon. That’s not to say there isn’t action – there are plenty of shootouts, fights, chases, blow-ups and the like. But it feels sanitized, and the whole outing is very paint-by-numbers.



That being said, there are plenty of funny moments to be had. Hulk Hogan attempting to act “troubled” is worth the price of admission alone. The Hulkster mows down middle-Eastern terrorists holding two large machine guns, and later gets the old Prerequisite Torture treatment. Carl Weathers brings his trademark charisma, and Shannon Tweed practically salvages the whole thing just by being there. Of course, you do get some classic Tweed-Fu. Martin Kove seems to be going for the David Letterman look of the day. They all walk in slow motion away from an explosion, and Hulk Hogan punches people on a hovercraft. So it’s not a total loss.

The whole thing is rife with stereotypes and stupidity, as you might expect from another pairing of director Cassar with Hulk Hogan around the same time as The Ultimate Weapon (1998). But you shouldn’t go in expecting more than that, and there is fun to be had with what’s there. 

So, if you’re willing to accept “The B-Team”, you could do a lot worse than Shadow Warriors: Assault on Death Mountain.

Comeuppance Review by: Ty and Brett

Also check out a write-up from our buddy, The Video Vacuum! 

Final Reprisal (1988)

Final Reprisal (1988)- * * *

Directed by: Teddy Page

Starring: Gary Daniels, Protacio Dee, Glazia Herradura, and Jim Gaines

In the heat of battle during the Vietnam War, Sgt. David Callahan (Daniels) along with old buddy and fellow soldier Charles Murphy (Gaines), among other members of an elite squad, stage a daring attack on the home of Vietnamese Captain Tran Van Phu (Dee). Things go horribly wrong when Van Phu’s young daughter Mai (Herradura) is senselessly murdered during the raid. Vowing revenge, Van Phu gets his wish when, five years later and now working as a trainer for the Thai military, Callahan has a family of his own. When they are mercilessly slaughtered, Callahan gets really mad and teams back up with Murphy so he can, at long last, get his FINAL REPRISAL. However, it won’t be all cut and dry, as some mysteries from the past begin to resurface…

Here we have some prime early Gary Daniels in only his second-ever film role – and it delivers the goods! Director Teddy Page rarely disappoints (here he’s credited as Tedd Hemingway; note the second “d” in Tedd), and the Page-Daniels alliance – working in the great year of 1988 and in a prime location, the Philippines – is indeed a recipe for success. Daniels’s skill and athleticism as a Martial Artist is on full display, and he’s as likable as ever. This is remarkable as he maintained these qualities throughout his career. He’s teamed up with Jim Gaines, who has had an amazing career of his own: Besides Final Reprisal, he was in Cop Game, Mannigan’s Force, Strike Commando 2, Jungle Rats, Robowar, and the rare Daniels debut The Secret of King Mahis Island – and that was just 1988!

Daniels and Gaines have a definite Crockett and Tubbs thing going on here. Miami Vice was super-hot at the time, and the clothes the two of them wear are a dead giveaway. Interestingly, Daniels’s first-ever screen credit was as “Male Stripper” in an episode of ‘Vice called Walk-Alone in ’86. Only two short years later, he was living the dream as a white-suited Crockett-esque lead. And while James “Sonny” Crockett was a Vietnam vet, Miami Vice didn’t feature Crockett mowing down baddies with a machine gun, going through “revenge training”, enduring the Prerequisite Torture as well as a torture montage. ‘Reprisal also contains killer fight scenes, as well as the classic guard tower falls and exploding huts.

While our heroes are most definitely fighting the commies, Final Reprisal offers an unusually sympathetic look at the other side of the coin. You feel bad for Van Phu and his daughter. This gives the movie a dimension you don’t often see. As a whole, Final Reprisal is a lot better and more entertaining than the much more well-known Missing in Action (1984). The whole outing starts with a bang and the viewer remains satisfied. It’s hard to ask for much more than that. Plus, we get a lot of the silenced-gun “pew” sound effect. This is to be distinguished from the “pew pew!” laser effect. A short, curt “pew” indicates a shooting done on the sly. We get a feast of them here, if there are any fans of that out there.

Puzzlingly, Final Reprisal never received a U.S. VHS release (and, as of this writing, has no U.S. DVD or Blu-Ray editions). This is a real shame, as it could have been a video store-era classic, and it could have raised the name recognition of Gary Daniels back then. It would have been perfect for video store shelves of the day. Thankfully, it does exist, and fans of Gary Daniels and/or 80’s action have a winner on their hands with Final Reprisal.

Comeuppance Review by: Ty and Brett 

Act Of Valor (2012)

Act Of Valor (2012)- * * *

Directed by: Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh

Starring: Roselyn Sanchez, Alex Veadov, and Nestor Serrano

When CIA agent Lisa Morales (Sanchez) is kidnapped, the finest in our military service, the Navy SEALS, snap into action. During the course of their rescue mission, they realize a massive terrorist plot is afoot. They have to catch a baddie named Christo (Veadov) and find out what he knows before it’s too late. This will require everything from underwater demolition, to jumping out of airplanes and helicopters, firefights, evasive driving, room clearance, and many other tools of the SEAL trade that, frankly, we’re too ignorant to understand. Will our brave warriors foil the terror plot? Find out today...

As you may already know, Act of Valor is unique in that it has real Navy SEALS, not actors, in the main roles. They mix it up with some professional actors as the lines between reality and fiction are blurred. We thought that was a pretty novel approach, and it has no precedent that we’re aware of. Interestingly, it seems this project started life as a training video, and somehow rolled into becoming a feature-length, narrative film that played in theaters. That might explain the presence of the two directors, as it seems fairly obvious which are the “training video” scenes (glorious shots of aircraft carriers, planes, and men diving out of them) and which are the “added to become a movie” scenes (everything else). Please don’t take that as a negative, however - as stated earlier, we appreciated the melding of the seemingly disparate elements to forge a (relatively) cohesive whole.

Perhaps because of its training video origins, it all looks highly professional and glossy (check out the Blu-Ray for best results), and it has some old-school action standbys that we all love and enjoy - the shooting, blow ups, guard towers, and even some Prerequisite Torture. It’s a fairly simple “heroes and villains” plot, and thankfully there are no kids mucking it all up. Because the plot is so basic, it probably would have helped the movie if it was streamlined down to about 90 minutes or so from its almost two-hour running time. 

Perhaps one of the best things about Act of Valor is the camaraderie between the SEALs. And sure, their acting is a little wooden - but they’re NOT ACTORS. Cut them a break. Besides, you can’t make fun of them, because they’re busy saving our lazy, review-writing butts from the real-life bad guys. Because this was such a surprise hit in 2012, it definitely paved the way for other hugely successful, audience-pleasing films such as Lone Survivor (2013) and American Sniper (2014). Everyone should see all three. Someone in Hollywood probably thought “if this is working so well with non-actors, what would happen if we brought in the pro’s?” The results speak for themselves. The American people have a hunger to see what’s going on in the military, and these three films provide that in a current context, which is important for us to see. 

The whole experience is pretty unusual, and the fact that one of the main baddies is named Christo we took to understand that the filmmakers were saying that pretentious art like wrapping Central Park in cellophane or wrapping tropical islands in cellophane, or, heck, wrapping anything in cellophane is an act of terrorism in and of itself. In the end, though, watching Act Of Valor may leave you with one question: "is joining the Navy SEALs right for me?" For our part we decided we would skip the grueling training and dangerous missions and do the next best thing: support movies like this. 

Comeuppance Review by: Brett and Ty