Film Review: THE PROTECTOR (1985, James Glickenhaus)

Stars: 3 of 5.

Running Time: 91 minutes.

Notable Cast or Crew: Jackie Chan (RUMBLE IN THE BRONX, THE LEGEND OF DRUNKEN MASTER), Danny Aiello (THE STUFF, DO THE RIGHT THING), Roy Chiao (BLOODSPORT, INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM), John Spencer (THE ROCK, THE WEST WING), Mike Starr (GOODFELLAS, ED WOOD), Moon Lee (MR. VAMPIRE, FIGHTING MADAM, FIGHTING MADAM 2).  Cinematography by Mark Irwin (VIDEODROME, SCANNERS).

Tag-line:  "Now, New York has a new weapon––a cop with his own way of fighting crime!"

Best one-liner:  "I never go anywhere in southeast Asia without an Uzi!"

In a familiar, darkened alleyway:
"Whaddya got for me today?"
-"Jackie Chan."
"Brilliant––he's one of my all-time favorite action stars, what with his gleeful comic timing, death-defying stunts, and penchant for Cannon Films-style wacky-action!"
-"What would you call that?  'Wacktion?'"
"Oh, stop.  So which one is it?  RUMBLE IN THE BRONX?  THE LEGEND OF DRUNKEN MASTER? WHO AM I?"
-"THE PROTECTOR."
"THE PROTECTOR?!  You've never reviewed a Jackie Chan movie before, and you're starting with this one?"
-"This ain't my first Jackie-rodeo.  I can start wherever I want.  Though the truth is, I'm starting here because something like RUMBLE IN THE BRONX fills me with so much joy that I find myself unable to do something so pedestrian as taking notes for a review."
"But THE PROTECTOR?!  Jackie disavowed this film––the Americans didn't know what to do with him, despite the fact it's a Golden Harvest co-production.  It's filled with toothless action, devoid of humor, and clearly choreographed by frightened insurance adjusters.  It's like they checked Jackie's charm at the door and stuck him in the middle of a straight-to-video Chuck Norris vehicle."
-"I take offense to that."
"But you'll admit that this is a little more 'HERO AND THE TERROR' than 'SUPERCOP,' will you not?"
-"So it's not his best work.  So what?  There's plenty to enjoy here, and on a number of levels.  For starters, it's from director James Glickenhaus, a sleazy-NYC scion who brought us MCBAIN and THE EXTERMINATOR, and who is thus indirectly responsible for EXTERMINATOR 2, one of Cannon Films' greatest achievements."
"Go on..."
-"It depicts a New York hellscape, like out of DEATH WISH 3 or CYBORG, gangs with gaudy skull earrings and leather jackets with oversized shoulderpads roaming around a burned-out urban husk, populated only by man-sized rats and trash can fires.  They take out truckin' buddy semi-trailers like bandits going after covered wagons. "

"I can appreciate that."
-"Then we have Jackie Chan and his partner."

"Who's his partner?"
-"It really doesn't matter, because in his very first scene he shows off a stuffed animal he bought for his kid.  This small, sympathetic touch clearly telegraphs that he's not long for this world.  Saying it was his last week before retirement would have worked just as well, too."
"As far as buddy cop flicks go, that is an indisputable truth."
-"Indeed.  And as I predicted, he is fated to die before even nine minutes of movie have elapsed.  Gunned down by a gang of dudes with machine guns who accidentally rob a dive bar at 10:00 A.M. instead of the grocery store from COBRA, which they clearly intended."

"What a tragic scene."
-"Don't worry--Jackie puts it right, blasting the bad dudes with a handgun and only occasionally using flourishes of physicality and martial art.


The last guy escapes, but Jackie aims a speedboat at his speedboat and blows him up real good, all the while making his escape with a very conveniently timed helicopter rope."



"Is that the Statue of Liberty, under renovation?"
-"Hell yes it is.  That's the kind of moxie this movie's got.  Glickenhaus loves his New York, warts and all.  Where another filmmaker might have chosen not to show the scaffolding to preserve the aesthetic fairy tale, Glickenhaus revels in it.  He probably shows it to us five or six times."
"Nice."
-"And curiously, the caliber of cinematography is much higher than you'd expect for this sort of film.  I soon discovered it was vividly photographed by Cronenberg's own Mark Irwin!"

"That man sure knows how to do a glassy, glossy cityscape."
 -"Indeed he does.  So with the plot officially underway, THE PROTECTOR makes sure it hits every buddy cop trope, down the line.  Jackie's stick-up-his-ass boss disciplines him with the old "that's no excuse for blowing up half the goddamn harbor" and threatens to have his "badge and gun on my desk!"

We've all been there.

which is followed up by a slow clap scene whereupon his colleagues dramatically submit their approval of his maverick, hot-doggin', action-luvin' ways.




This is one of the best-ever 'contagious slow-clap' scenes in cinema, right up there with ROCKY IV.  The dead-eyed stare from the cop who starts it is well worth the price of admission.

Soon thereafter, there's a fashion show (prefiguring DEATH WISH 5),

Not quite ALL THAT JAZZ.

and Jackie is paired with Danny Aiello, and pretty much the remainder of the film takes place in Hong Kong––"
"Hold on one gosh-gadoodlin' minute.  Did you say Danny Aiello?"
-"Yes."

"You mean to tell me that there exists an 80s buddy cop movie with Jackie Chan and Danny Aiello."
-"Correct."
"Talk about burying the lede!  What the hell are you doing?"
-"Come on.  Let me do this at my own pace."
"So what does this turn into, a fish-out-of-water story, with Aiello at sea in Hong Kong?"

-"No, and they were clearly resisting that idea.  They say he 'spent a lot of time there during Vietnam.'  You can tell he knows the city very well because they have him say things like 'I never go anywhere in southeast Asia without an Uzi!'"
"Oh."
-"Yeah.  Once we get to Hong Kong, the proceedings slow down a little bit.  I think Glickenhaus is a bit out of his element. Eventually, there's an assassin wearing Marianne Faithfull's outfit from GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE, some head butts, some homoerotic splashing,


an action scene at a massage parlor/brothel, and a guy who attacks Jackie Chan with a handheld buzzsaw."

"Is that buzzsaw spraying neon-colored liquids?"
-"They're in a paint factory or something.  I don't know.  So later, Roy Chiao––the 'Obi-Wan Kenobi' of BLOODSPORT and the gangster at the Club Obi Wan in INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM shows up to portray the villain of the piece."
"I see what you did there, and I'm not particularly impressed."

-"Anyway, Chiao doesn't have a whole lot to do beyond 'look menacing.'  Eventually, Danny Aiello––and not Jackie Chan, like the movie poster promises––wields that Duke Nukem style hand cannon and makes some stuff explode.

Jackie Chan drops a load of bricks on a helicopter and that's about it.  The stunts never take center stage and Jackie is never is allowed to do anything too endearing.  The whole thing is kinda not as good as it should be."
"That's what I figured.  Next time I'm picking the movie."
-"Yeah, yeah.  Three stars."

––Sean Gill

Film Review: THE EXTERMINATOR (1980, James Glickenhaus)

Stars: 4 of 5.
Running Time: 104 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Robert Ginty (COMING HOME, HARLEY DAVIDSON AND THE MARLBORO MAN), Samantha Eggar (WELCOME TO BLOOD CITY, THE BROOD), Christopher George (PIECES, ENTER THE NINJA), Steve James (VIGILANTE, THE DELTA FORCE, I'M GONNA GET YOU SUCKA), Irwin Keyes (DEATH WISH 4, David Lynch's ON THE AIR, FRIDAY THE 13TH, THE WARRIORS, the voice of 'Bruno the Bigfoot' in SAM AND MAX HIT THE ROAD), David Lipman (FRANKENHOOKER, WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S II), and Stan Getz as himself. Special makeup effects by Stan Winston.
Tag-line: "A one man army. A new kind of soldier in a new kind of war."
Best one-liner: "If you're lying, I'll be back."

So I saw Cannon Films' EXTERMINATOR 2 before I saw the first one, and I gotta say, while I enjoyed 2 quite a bit on a certain level, 1 is the far better film. THE EXTERMINATOR is sort of like a ROLLING THUNDER/TAXI DRIVER mashup as directed by an adolescent boy in 1980. EXTERMINATOR 2 is a DEATH WISH II/BREAKIN' mashup directed by an eight-year-old in 1984. That's probably the most diplomatic way to put it. Additionally, after seeing Robert Ginty's (R.I.P.) mumbly, unfocused performance as the Exterminator in Part 2, I was prepared to write him off as some bland no-talent, but after seeing him in Part 1, he's actually, at times, a pretty solid actor. I think this marks the first time EVER that the influence of Golan/Globus has dulled someone down (instead of making them more flamboyant).

Anyway, let me tell you about the fil– FOOOOOOOOOOSH!!

This movie starts right out with an explosion, and this a full five years before RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II. And it's not just an explosion– it's a human body spiraling through the air in agony as it blows away from an explosion. Damn! This movie is gonna be brutal! It's a 'Nam flashback, and, naturally, we segue to a torture scene– pre-FIRST BLOOD and post-ROLLING THUNDER. Robert Ginty and legendary martial arts actor Steve James have been captured by the Viet Cong, and of their comrades is gruesomely beheaded via a Stan Winston special effect.

Ginty holds fast.

They're about to do Ginty when James breaks loose and, together with Ginty, take out all the VC.

Amidst the carnage, some random dudes are running around on fire– this series has standards to maintain.

We then cut to NYC, 1980.

A bigger war zone than Vietnam? Possibly, according to this movie. James and Ginty now work for some kind of grocery warehouse, packing meats and produce into trucks.

There are some shady gangster-types who hang around, which gives it a kind of 'THIEVES' HIGHWAY/ evil fruit trucker biz' feel. A street gang called the "Ghetto Gouls" busts in and fights James and Ginty. Whenever gangs attack in this movie, you get a lot of 'victim POV,' where the gang member looks directly into and taunts the camera.

This is a good thing. James and Ginty mop the floor with the Ghetto Ghouls (they get their blood-pumping from 'Nam flashbacks), and we think that's the last we've seen of them. Well, we think that's the last we've seen of them if we've never seen a vigilante movie before. Anyway, the Ghouls come back and beat Steve James within an inch of his life (and with a gardening claw, no less), paralyzing him. Within one minute of finding out his friend has been paralyzed, Ginty is already torturing a random Ghoul with a flamethrower for information-

and within ten minutes, the original perps have been ejected from a house party (where they're playing 'Burn, Baby, Burn' by the Trammps) and have had their faces EATEN BY RATS. The Exterminator is born, and the movie's in high gear. It's not really done out of revenge, per sé- The Exterminator just seems to be on 'Nam-induced autopilot.


Then we got the totally schweet Christopher George in the role of 'cop investigating the Exterminator, but begrudgingly being won over by his take-charge attitude' role, which had been seen many times before (Robert Ryan in THE WILD BUNCH, Vincent Gardenia in DEATH WISH, etc.) and would be seen many times again (Yaphet Kotto in THE PARK IS MINE!, Ed Lauter in DEATH WISH III, etc., etc.).

They try and build this whole annoying subplot in, though, where George is dating a doctor played by Samantha Eggar (who is really quite talented- she played the wife and mother in Cronenberg's THE BROOD).

"What was 'Nam like?"
"–It was bad. Not as bad as New York City. But it was bad."

She's given absolutely nothing to do in this role, though, and when they're on dates (and they go on a million dates), you yearn for the scenes of the Exterminator carefully loading his weaponry or the bad guys mugging old ladies and high-fiving.

A common scenario.

The film's street cred comes from its possession of a certain attentiveness to quotidian detail:
the shabby denizens of Times Square (including a whacky, face-fondling trans woman who touches the Exterminator in passing),


a stuttering junkie hooker that can hardly form a coherent thought, the mob henchmen who scrutinize a bathroom stall before their boss uses it, the awesome interior design of the Exterminator's apartment,

and the drawn out exchange (in the midst of a TAXI DRIVER hooker-saving subplot) between the Exterminator and a ramshackle hotel lackey involving the cost of sheets for a paid sexual encounter ($5 for clean sheets, and a $5 deposit on the sheets)...

"YA WANT DA SHEETS?! YA WANT DA SHEETS?!"


Maybe Enzo G. Castellari worked on this thing as an uncredited asscrack coordinator. Stranger things have happened.


Anyway, probably my two favorite 'vigilante-in-action' scenes are these:

#1. The Exterminator captures a mobster in a restaurant's bathroom (he hides in the trash can with a hypodermic needle).

He chains him up and interrogates him about his home security above a gigantic meat grinder.


"If you're lying, I'll be back," Ginty says (pre-Arnie, I might add). Turns out the mobster was full of shit and only wanted his vicious guard dog to take out Mr. Ginty. The Exterminator survives said attack, which only means one thing:

Burgertime.

And I really admire the filmmakers' willingness to go there.


#2. The Exterminator learns of a dungeon where young boys and hookers are tortured with a soldering iron and other such implements by a New Jersey State Senator (played by David Lipman, FRANKENHOOKER's first electrocuted John). This New Jersey State Senator must never show up to work- it doesn't matter if it's midnight on a Saturday night or 12 noon on a weekday, you better believe he's gonna be at his Times Square dungeon, torturing some slave child. Makes you wonder what exactly goes on in the New Jersey State Senate. Not much legislating, I guess. Anyway, the Exterminator decides to prep for this encounter by hollowing out his bullets and pouring mercury into them.

Why he does this exactly is left up to the viewer to imagine. I mean, if he's already shooting people dead with the bullets, is it really important to him that they get mercury poisoning, post-mortem? The intent is different, but it's kind of in the same ballpark as sanitizing the skin with alcohol prior to a lethal injection. Seems a bit pointless. Anyway, the Exterminator busts in and shoots him dead, right in the kidney.


And then, um, I guess he gets mercury poisoned afterward. Take that!

There's also a faction of evil politicians and CIA men who want the Exterminator dead- with no trial or subsequent public embarassment of the government, whose inability to clean up the streets is being highlighted by this angry, mercury poisoning man. Christopher George is pissed off by their holier-than-thou, big shot attitude (which is similar to Robert Davi's FBI douche in DIE HARD) and tells them what's what:

"What do you think?"
"I THINK YOU HAVE TO TAKE A SHIT- IT'S COMIN' OUTTA YOUR MOUTH INSTEAD'A YOUR ASSHOLE!!!"

It's moments like this that I'm truly glad Christopher George pursued a career in acting. Anyway, I won't spoil how it all goes down, but you have to love that a character commits a heart-wrenching act of euthanasia and then delivers a "You're fly's open!" one-liner within, literally, thirty seconds of each other.

Your fly is open, Christopher George. Zing!

Well, EXTERMINATOR, you've impressed me. I'm not sure why the flamethrower was so essential to the marketing (he threatens one man with it but never once pulls the trigger) and the plot of the sequel (he exclusively uses the flamethrower in part 2). I guess a dude cleaning up the streets of New York with a flamethrower certainly has pull (or at least Golan and Globus thought so). Well, a dude cleaning up the streets of New York with mercury poisoning bullets and a giant meat-grinder has a lot of pull, too, in my opinion.

Obviously not quite in the same league as Paul Schrader's additions to the genre, or even something like Bill Lustig's VIGILANTE, but THE EXTERMINATOR is still a damned solid, furious, n' sleazy revenge flick. Pass the burgers.

-Sean Gill

Film Review: EXTERMINATOR 2 (1984, Mark Bunztman)

Stars: 4 of 5.
Running Time: 89 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Mario van Peebles (HEARTBREAK RIDGE, RAPPIN'), Robert Ginty (THE EXTERMINATOR), Frankie Faison (all the Hannibal Lector movies, C.H.U.D., CAT PEOPLE), Arye Gross (HOUSE II: THE SECOND STORY, SOUL MAN), supposed bit parts by John Turturro and L. Scott Caldwell (Rose on TV's LOST)- he's 'man shouting in vacant lot, but I never found her, even though I was looking pretty hard. Produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Music by David Spear (MORTUARY ACADEMY).
Tag-line: "John Eastland is back - He Knew You Were Lying - The Frightmare Continues!"
Best one-liner: "You want to clean out the streets? I AM the streets!"

The film starts right off with a bang, or rather a FOOOOOSH, with the Exterminator (Robert Ginty) pointing his flamethrower at the camera and letting it rip. We later see the exact same shot in the context of the film, but it doesn't really diminish it's 'FOOOOOSH in the face' impact.


We're talkin' DEATH WISH- but with a flamethrower.


Now I have never seen the Cannon logo do THAT.

And basically, this is Cannon's precursor to DEATH WISH 3. It was their trial run. And it's not perfect- they learned a lot. But I think it also has much to teach all of us. Now clearly, they wanted to create an ominous, crime-addled dystopian world on the brink of ruin. Old people are shot indiscriminately by cackling ex-dancers, police helicopters are blown up, and women are stabbed (and their attackers then brag "I like it when their faces go crazy like that, when they think the world has gone psycho and there's no way out!"). Dudes on roller skates abduct women just so they can get them hooked on smack. It's set up like a post-apocalyptic Middle Ages, with drawbridges, suits of armor, torches, subterranean hideouts, giant blades, etc. But there are unwitting elements of this world that at times seem more like a utopia. Allow me to explain: completely integrated gangs hang out together in complete post-racial harmony. Our main characters spend all of their time at a sleazier version of the bar from FLASHDANCE, which offers "Free Beer" every night. At least that's what the sign out front says. It's all boarded up and has trouble maintaining a clientele, but with free beer every night, it's unclear to me why the entire city of New York is not constantly frequenting this bar. Plus, the Exterminator's pseudo-stripper ("About six months ago, I came to New York, and Broadway seems about as far away as ever!") girlfriend is gyrating and crotch-thrusting to some sweet 80's beats every night. Everything is accompanied by tunes that alternate between rootin' tootin' MIDI basement porn music and the something that would maybe play on the start-up screen for a really shitty martial arts-based NES game. Here's a taste. I mean aside from being caught by Mario van Peebles and ritually crucified- I don't know about you, but this definitely feels like a place in which I could spend some serious time.

The film has an odd feel to it. Golan and Globus were still finding their voice. They had already made DEATH WISH II, BREAKIN', and a couple of Ninja movies, but hadn't done the bulk of their Bronson work, any of their Chuck Norris, no Michael Dudikoff, nor the real dance classics, like BREAKIN' 2, RAPPIN', SALSA, etc. And I don't know how involved they were in the production. I mean, clearly they were around when van Peebles was having his hair and costume done, and clearly they're responsible for the dancer girlfriend

the random break-dance interlude, and the odd roller skating performance art


set to music from BREAKIN', but first-time director Mark Bunztman is probably responsible for a lot of the wacko awkwardnness. Everyone mumbles in this movie, except for van Peebles (as "X"), who thinks he's playing a Shakespearian villain.

Albeit a Shakespearian villain with spiked shoulder pads, one-strap overalls, equal amounts of glitter and sweat, nipple-covering suspenders (on occasion), and a hairstyle that keeps alternating between a foppish Jheri curl and a Grace Jones-style flat-top 'fro.

His main henchman wears a tail coat, juggles fire, and rides around in roller skates for no particular reason. Yeah, this is pretty terrific. But the mumbling is insane, and at times the film seems completely improvised. The pacing is ludicrous as well. "X" and his crew take about 15 minutes to ritually kill an armored truck driver. But it's not a 15 minute torture scene, which could at least be forgiven as an attempt to insert some gratuitous gore– here, they're just carrying him around.... very, very, very slowly. You'll see probably one of the most awkward 'date' scenes in film history, between the Exterminator and his gal. The poor man's Fred Williamson (Frankie Faison)

does some drunk garbage truck driving, feeds some stray dogs and talks and laughs under his breath a lot to Ginty.

Ginty really doesn't know how to deliver a one liner. He gives no emphasis as he off-handedly mutters things like "Looks like some garbage needs to be removed." On the other hand, "X" carefully vocalizes entire speeches about being and owning 'the streets.' Half the time, though, you have no idea what exactly is happening as you strain to hear the half-assedly ad-libbed dialogue.

But don't allow me to lose my focus. This movie was designed for one reason, and one reason only: so that we could watch dudes in asbestos suits running around on fire, waving their arms helplessly in slow motion.


Get used to the POV shot of 'criminal-about-to-be-torched," cause you're gonna be seeing it a lot.


They shoulda shot this in 3D!

Promotional materials called the Exterminator a 'Sherman tank on two legs who breathes fire like Godzilla.' Damn! And these flamed dudes are not just any criminals- they're criminals who put drugs on the streets! This idea would come to a bigger budget fruition in Cannon's DEATH WISH 4- THE CRACKDOWN, but it's still pretty damn solid here. "X" proclaims, "With this powder, I CONTROL THE STREETS!" after he snags a bunch of coke from some carnation-wearing mobsters. Later, when the Exterminator cleverly switches out his drugs, "X" carefully enunciates: "THIS IS FLOUR.... WHERE'S MY DRUG?!?"

Anyway, the Exterminator captures a gang member, and tortures him by leaving him in the back of a garbage truck. Several days later, we get a little of the old Cannon 'comic relief' when they show the hoodlum, still in the back of the truck, munching on some trash. This all leads to a finale where the Exterminator tricks out the garbage truck with hidden machine guns and a snow plow to make it an unstoppable combat vehicle. Of course, there's the high stakes showdown between "X" and the Exterminator, which has to add the whole "we're not so different, you and me" cliché to the mix.

"X" taunts: "How do you like being the animal, Exterminator?! What are you hiding from, masked man? What's the matter, are you nervous? Are we too much ALIKE?" Yeah, this is a subtle movie. That's why I like it. Four mumbly, flaming stars.

Note Peebles' Patrick Magee-style posturing!

-Sean Gill