Armed Response
                              
Director: Fred Olen Ray
Year: 1986
Rating: 5.0
I would walk through a mine field to watch a film with David Carradine, Lee Van Cleef and Mako in it. Hell, I would even watch a B action film from the 1980s with some of the worst acting and tiresome dialogue you can imagine. Not often but at least this once. This is pretty awful but I gave it the rating I did because of the other actors in the film - Conan Lee! for a nanosecond, Dick Miller for a good two minutes, Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa for five minutes and the wonderful Michael Berryman for a lot of the film. Think of the poster of The Hills Have Eyes and that mutant looking man on it is him. He looks just as scary here as he hands out fortune cookies and grins like he just ate your insides. But besides the cast, there isn't much good to say about this film.

 

It kind of clunks along with flashbacks to Vietnam thrown in for no reason, marital discord for no reason, father-son-son-son relationship stuff for no reason, a strip club for no reason but no complaints here, the little girl that you know will be kidnapped for no reason - but even with all that dross it still comes in at 80-minutes which in this case I was grateful for. Still it is Carradine and Cleef with Mako as the villain. Not too shabby.

 

Carradine runs a bar with his father and brothers as his best customers. Non-paying I expect. Dad is a barfly who won't go home. One of the brothers is a private eye and he and his partner get a job to do a trade - money for a statue - from Mako who is Yakuza. Nearly all his henchman except for Cary are white guys which may explain why they suck as Yakuzas. The trade goes wrong and the brother gets shot in the stomach and only makes it to Carradine's home before he dies with the statue. Mako and his crew come looking for both the money and the statue. And of course Carradine leaves his wife and daughter unprotected at home. Geez, who would think the bad guys would go there. Anyways, the final ten minutes almost makes up for the rest of the film as there is a big shoot-out in the center of town where apparently there are no people and no cops. A couple decent stunts. Carradine blowing guy after guy away as they come out in the open.  It is directed by Fred Olen Ray who is legendary for his many bad films - often with the word "bikini" in the title though admittedly Bikini Frankenstein sounds intriguing.