• Directed by Charles Bail
• Written by Stan Berkowitz, Gary Kent, and Chuck Bail
• Starring
  • Marc Singer
  • Steve Railsback
  • Kim Lankford
  • Beverly Leech
  • Soon-Tek Oh

Word to the wise, out there in VideoDistributionLand: Make the cassette covers attractive, will ya? In this movie, Marc Singer has the beard from Cyberzone and the cool hair from Beastmaster 3, but the front cover shows him wearing his Steelers cap pulled down low on his forehead, which makes him look like a homeless guy, and the screencaps on the back are so blurry and inconsequential I feared this flick might be shot on video. I’m glad to report that the movie inside the box is better than the box makes it look — which isn’t much, but we take what we can get.

“Hey, I’m just happy my brother Ron lets me out of the basement sometimes!”

Not that the first thing we see during the opening credits is all that pretty either. Because in a dumpster on a Pittsburgh street, Clint Howard is graphically raping and mutilating a whimpering woman. You know, I don’t know how Clint Howard hasn’t blown his brains out by now. There are a lot of actors who rely on sucky roles, and there are a lot of actors who usually play bad guys, but few people in Hollywood so consistently play such despicable dregs of humanity as Clint Howard. At best he gets roles that are solidly annoying (see Carnosaur); more often, well, did I mention that he’s raping and mutilating? That’s the kind of role he normally has. Seems to me that immersing one’s self in personalities like that for a living would just rot the soul completely. (The only other actor I can think of whose ouvre should inspire such self-loathing is Billy Drago, and even then it’s not a fair comparison.) I dunno; bottom line, I Would Hate To Be Clint Howard.

I would especially hate to be him when Marc Singer’s plainclothes cop character, Mike Justus (ooh, I so appreciate subtlety) is the first to arrive on the scene. Justus chases the waste-of-sperm across rooftops, endures his goading about how the system has consistently put him back on the streets, saves the rapist scum’s life from a fall and gets a kick in the balls for his efforts… You know the tables are going to turn, because hey, Clint Howard’s only going to get so many lucky hits in on Marc Singer, and pretty soon Justus is beating the well-deserved shit out of the puke. Unfortunately, an apartment-dweller nearby catches only this last part on videotape, and without the inciting preamble, it looks like a case of police brutality. Upshot being that the rapist goes free, and Justus is “persuaded” into early retirement.

Mike Justus: A tough guy who still takes time to smell the flowers.

Sick of it anyway, he decides to take some time off in North Hollywood, fixing up a house his aunt left to him that’s just been vacated by renters. Unfortunately, the place looks like a hellhole compared to the circa-1957 photo he has, so he decides to do the fixing-up himself over the next couple of weeks before moving on to who knows where.

But as you can imagine, this isn’t some quiet little suburb. No, this is gang territory, and the merchants of the nearby strip mall are being terrorized by hoodlums who deal drugs in plain site, accost little old ladies, and express disapproval by pissing on cupcakes. (Not their own cupcakes. That would’t make much sense.) When three of them start breaking the windows of a Korean storeowner’s (Soon-Tek Oh) donut shop, Justus leaps into action and dispenses some well-deserved whupass. He thus gets himself a reputation among the local hoods, as well as an introduction to the local police, prominently featuring Sgt. Freeborn (Steve Railback), who laments the inability of their budget to cover more adequate patrolling.

Although Freeborn’s agreeable though hand-tied, the city attorney’s more of a buttwipe — in fact, at the town meeting they have to complain to the authorities, he actually puts the onus back on the storekeepers, threatening to shut their businesses down because of the “unhealthy environment” their presence encourages. Justus, not wanting to get involved, stands back and watches as the shopkeepers and other locals, led, by Father Brophy (Bryan Cranston) and his indeterminate accent, organize a neighborhood watch around the slogan of “Take Norwood Back,” abbreviated to “TNB” on the backs of the bright red jackets they wear on patrol.

Bright red jackets? Jeez, didn’t ANY of these people ever watch the original Star Trek series?!

‘Course, when I say that Justus stands back, that’s all relative. He has a hard time standing back from Jeanette (Kim Lankford), the video store owner who’s so desperate for a man it’s almost embarrassing to watch. Despite her, um, charms, Mike insists that he’s not planning on staying around long enough to be a part of the community, and aside from advising them to patrol armed (advice that’s ignored, naturally), he doesn’t contribute much.

All of that changes when the whole red-jacketed patrol gets ambushed in the school playground and get the snot beat out of them, including Jeanette. There is, after all, a Breaking Point in all of these movies, and at this point Justus decides he’s not selling; he’s sticking around the whup these punks once and for all.

Which is all well and good, except that we’re now a full hour into the movie, and the plot’s just now about to take off. Justus calls back his old partner and gets info on a few former “associates” now living in LA — criminals who owe Justus a favor. One, Willie (Beverly Leech), is a kung-fu hooker/scam artist. The other, Angel (Tiny Lister), is (as he describes it), “big, bad, blind [in one eye], and Born Again.” Together, they form a posse comitatus and start on their little crusade, including knocking over meth labs and stealing the gangsters’ money to buy weapons to fight those very gangsters.

“Couldn’t we just get a room?”

Now, I love a good wish-fulfillment ass-kicking movie as much as the next person. More, actually, as I have a highly-developed sense of outrage (an uneasy bedfellow with my equally-developed cynicism), and I often dearly wish that the grossly ethically-challenged of our species could be taught remedial morality by a vicious beating (and though I know it won’t work, I’d still like to make sure by trying just one more time). And heaven knows, there’s no shortage of movies willing to show me that Right Makes Might, and Might Conquers All.

The problem here is that I know it isn’t true, and if you want me to suspend my willing and eager disbelief, you have to keep from distracting me with the truth. Posit a single gang of hoodlums in an otherwise peaceful locale, preferably commanded by a charismatic scumbag, and I’m more than willing to trust that the conflict will be resolved when said scumbag has had his ass decisively handed to him. But when you paint a moderately-accurate picture of actual gang culture, of the degree to which young people have co-opted those warped values to instill a sense of purpose and importance in their lives, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that a single ex-cop, accompanied by two quirky accomplices and the strength of his Pure Heart, can conclusively end a societal problem with roots that go far beyond a local gang of humanity-deficient punks. Even if that ex-cop IS Marc Singer.

Other deficiencies: The truncated and sketched-in romance (the main purpose of which is to give the bad guys a hostage to hold over Justus’ head in the end), a similarly sketched-in hint of a love triangle between Justus, video-store Jeanette, and kung-fu hooker Willie; the disappearance of the spiritually-distraught Angel from the plot after he loses control and beats a gangbanger to death; the upbeat Highway to Heaven tenor of the first half, leaving little time to get into true whupass mode; and a showdown which takes place in — you guessed it — an industrial setting in which young punks jump out at random like the population of a video game, when it would have taken all of three brain cells to set up an effective ambush and wipe Justus out once and for all. Oh, and the tippy-top of the climax, in which Justus saves the main baddie from certain and deserved death, only to have the baddie pul a gun and justify his immediate dispatch with self-defense. (Here’s a sense of my own morality: If the guy has hurt innumerable people without a thought, and will undoubtably do the same thing once saved, including his savior in the ranks, you just probably just let him plummet to his death with a clear conscience.) The main baddie, by the way, is the “secret power” behind the gangbangers, and it’s absolutely no secret who it is once they introduce the concept of his existence.

“Factory? Yup. Catwalks? Check. Must be the showdown.”

Was it too much cheese with my vitamins, or two much vitamin with my cheese? Whichever it was, the movie ended up the less for being unable to decide its destiny, either mindless action or hard-hitting drama. For all that, it’s certainly not a painful movie, and, as indicated to begin with, certainly better than the cover design would indicate. (Note how that brings a nice sense of closure…)

A Notable Quotable:

“There is no justice — just us.”

- Justus to Willie (did I mention my appreciation of subtlety?)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 12
• breasts: 3
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• cupcakes you really don’t want to eat: two dozen
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 6
  • Tom “Tiny” Lister (Angel) played “Klaang” in the Enterprise pilot “Broken Bow”
  • Clint Howard (the rapist) played “Balok” in the original episode “The Corbomite Maneuver,” and “Grady” in the second half of the DS9 two-parter “Past Tense”
  • Juan Garcia (“Federico”) played “John Torres” in two episodes of Voyager
  • Harvey Jason (“Lou”) played “Felix Leech” in the TNG episode “The Big Goodbye”
  • Shelly Desai (“Rasool,” the real-estate agent) played “V’Sal” in the TNG episode “Data’s Day”
  • Ron Soble (“Chief McTighe”) played “Wyatt Earp” (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) in the original episode “Spectre of the Gun”
  • (Beverly Leech (Willie) did the voice of Ensign Yraxys in the video game Star Trek: Away Team, but I don’t think that counts)