“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds."
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Final Score (1986)
aka Strike Commando
Finding this is tough; there are some VHS copies floating around and a DVD that's never been released in the US... and that's a shame, because this is worth seeing. [As I type this, I just know someone will tell me it's now readily available] Christopher Mitchum stars in this ultimate 1980's action film. There's a long 10 minute intro, where Mitchum's son is killed and his wife gang-raped and then killed. Once you get past that, it's 70 minutes of explosions, car crashes and gunfire. Every cliché gets hit: there's a flashback to Vietnam, complete with exploding huts and guard towers; the hero gets tortured; there's a car chase that ends with a vehicle flipping after a truck full of tomatoes gets spilled, there's a MacGuffin of a disc with evidence, there's a helicopter explosion. Three days after his wife's murder, Mitchum teams up with a woman who wants revenge for her sister's death and they fall in love, which makes this revenge for the loss of the love of his life questionable. Mitchum rides a motorcycle with both a machine gun and a rocket launcher, uses the latter to blow up a car, and then jumps over the flaming wreckage! One stunt gets repeated, using shots from a different angle and they pretend it's a separate incident. There's an impaling on a tree branch, a hot poker shoved up an ass, a bomb set off in a guy's crotch. There's stunts where the stuntmen did not walk away. This deserves to be better known.
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