Seriously, this may be the greatest movie ever made. Well, for guys like me and Marty McKee!

Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Olivier Grunier as partners!

Fred "The Hammer" Williamson

Martin Kove

and

Gary Busey!

http://www.gorillapictures.net/soft_target.html

Wasn't that a Janis Joplin song?

From the director of the incredible Gary Daniels actioner RECOIL!

The cast also includes Jerry Airola, who just recently came within a hair of being the sheriff of Las Vegas. I doubt this will be the greatest B-movie ever, but that cast is quite a remarkable assemblage of personalities.

wow! very impressive trailer! nice to see the US still producing explosive action B-movies!

Is Gary Busey the cheif of police? I wouldn't want to live in that town.

Thanks for that trailer link. I finally watched it. Wow! They don't make 'em like this anymore. And they should! THIS is the film Tarantino/Rodriguez' GRINDHOUSE is trying to be. And the kind of cast GRINDHOUSE should have. I only hope it's got more martial arts scenes than the trailer led us to believe are in there.

Even sadder, you could make 40 of these type of movies on what GRINDHOUSE is costing to make. 80 if you budget real well!

Brian are you ready for this? SOFT TARGET, was made just last year ... so they do still make movies like this, people just don't watch them anymore. That's the real tragedy.

A friend of mine who loves this stuff has informed me that Daniels and Wilson worked together before, in BLOODFIST IV. In fact, said friend is so obsessed with this type of film he made a spoof/tribute called MUSTANG IRONHEART. You can check out the trailer here:

http://www.mustangironheart.com/

I confirm it, being as I surely must be the only person dumb enough to watch all eight BLOODFIST movies. The long-haired Daniels and the Dragon even have a brief fight scene in a parking lot (or atop a parking garage). Daniels' role is quite small though (this might be his only scene), as it was at the beginning of his career.

BLOODFIST IV: DIE TRYING's plot is sort of a combination of KISS ME DEADLY (the McGuffin is a box of chocolates that conceals nuclear warhead triggers!) and THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (thugs murder everyone at Wilson's workplace looking for said box, while Don is out repo'ing a car). '80s starlet Amanda Wyss (BETTER OFF DEAD), bald James Tolkan ("Slacker!"), lusty Liz Torres and hardbodied Cat Sassoon are also in it.

Are you adding this to your Netflix queue?

I made it to six. I should really find the other two so I can join that illustrious club. I'll get right on that after I finish the WITCHCRAFT series. :rolleyes:

And that TWILIGHT ZONE box!

All the Don talk in the "What have you been watching?" thread made me look this one up again. Damn, I am really slipping. This hit DVD this past week with the new title CROOKED. Looks like I will be heading to the videostore of doom (Blockbuster) to get this.

Kris Kristofferson... :D

It's scheduled to come from Netflix tomorrow. Stay tuned...

Well. Maybe it's true. You really can't go home again.

I haven't seen a Don "The Dragon" Wilson movie this bad since...REDEMPTION, which also was directed by Art Camacho. CROOKED is as paint-by-numbers as they come with nobody involved acting as though they gave a damn. It's almost completely lifeless. Everyone moves and speaks in slow motion. Editing is awful, as many shots go on for a second too long, after everyone has finished speaking or moving out of frame. You can't really fault Wilson and Olivier Gruner much, because they act about as well as they usually do. It's obvious, though, unless Camacho is an even worse director than I think he is, that The Dragon's fighting skills have waned. He's not yet at Seagal-level where a double does all the fighting with jiggly closeups of his head cut in, but he's not far from Chuck Norris WALKER, TEXAS RANGER either.

And Gary Busey... He's pretty shameful. Camacho deserves blame too, because he obviously gave Busey no direction whatsoever. Busey makes no attempt to play a big-city police captain. He rambles on about the same flaky New Age-y stuff that he does in interviews, and he may well have believed he was filming a new episode of I'M WITH BUSEY. Fred Williamson, who is third-billed, surely shot all his scenes in one night, and is gone from the picture less than 15 minutes into it.

Bill Martell's story is strictly standard stuff. Some cops (including Fred) and the government witness they're protecting are all killed by a young mobster named Nugentti (Michael Cavalieri) and a cop on the take, whose face we don't see. However, you'll guess his identity approximately 0.29 seconds after he appears. Escaping is Angel, a sexy hooker (Diana Kauffman) on her first assignment, who's hiding in the bathroom when the baddies shoot up the joint. She gets away with a key to a locker holding some money, and even though this plot point occasionally rears its head, nobody seems very committed to it.

Busey assigns two cops who hate each other to the case. One is straight-laced Homicide dick Wilson; the other, rebellious Vice cop Gruner. For some reason, Busey appoints them U.S. marshals, even though 1) I don't think he can legally do that, 2) there's no reason they need to be marshals, and 3) this is another plot point immediately forgotten.

Wilson and Gruner quickly grab Angel and take her to a series of safe houses, each of which is eventually invaded by Nugentti's ninja-clad goons, who are summarily dispatched by the heroes in lumbering fashion. Camacho and Martell attempt a red herring--how do the bad guys always find the hiding place?--by having Angel place a surreptitious phone call. We never learn who she called or why, even after it's established that she isn't the one selling Wilson and Gruner out.

Oh, yeah, Martin Kove appears in this movie too, oh so briefly and with little purpose.

I guess if you're a Don "The Dragon" Wilson fan, you might want to check this one out. He and Gruner get to play sex scenes with topless large-breasted silicone-enhanced actresses and occasionally kick a stuntman in the face. CROOKED both looks and sounds cheap with drab digital cinematography, flat sound and a wretched score. To be fair, everything in the trailer actually occurs in the movie, but it's a lot more interesting in two minutes than it is in 93.