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Released by: Cinema Epoch
Released on: March 25th, 2014.
Director: Amir Shervan
Cast: Harold Diamond, Jim Brown, Robert Z'Dar
Year: 1990
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The Movie:
From the man who brought you Samurai Cop comes this film made a year later using a few of the same cast members and what appear to be some of the same locations. Story wise this one has more in common with home invasion movies like Last House On The Left than the buddy cop action movies that inspired Samurai Cop, this one begins with a scene in which a guy with a moustache and a great acid washed denim jacket named Joe Lynch (played by…. John Lynch) is auditioning some dancing girls. For what? We never find out. But once he's done, he starts banging one in the bathroom of a restaurant only to be interrupted in the middle of the act by a tough guy named Tony Stone (Robert Z'Dar). It seems Tony has got a big job planned and so he and John head off to go rob some sort of ice cream truck facility? Either way, they shoot up the security guards and wind up getting nabbed by the cops, led by Lt. Sunset (Jim Brown) but not before they somehow stash a hundred and fifty grand in cold, hard cash with Tony's stepmom.
When Tony and John wind up on a prison bus, Tony's younger brother Jesse (Alexander Virdon) and their Uncle Loony (Jimmy Williams) manage to stop the bus and shoot the guards. This allows Tony and John to escape but Jesse gets shot in the gut in the ensuing firefight. They flee and hole up at a house where to hot chicks and a pre-pubescent boy named Brendan are all hanging out. It turns out one of these chicks is the wife of all American ponytailed ass kicker John Morgan (Harold Diamond) and the other hot chick his sister in law. When John takes his kid off to kickboxing classes and winds up having to teach a dude with long blonde hair a weird moustache a lesson, Tony and company move in and take over the house. John returns and they demand he go and get a doctor for Jesse. So he does, and somehow comes back with a Mexican doctor named Fuji (played by Joselito Rescober!?!?) who does what he can to help Jesse by removing the bullet. Before you know it, John Lynch is sneaking into the bathroom to rape John Morgen's wife while she puzzlingly decides to relax with a sensual bubble bath. Sunset and his team of cops are on the case, but they might not figure out just where Stone and his crew are hiding out. When the plan to get the money back from 'stepmom' goes awry, Tony and Lynch start to turn things up a notch but Morgan is completely prepared to use whatever training it is that he has to school them in the art of death!
Killing American Style is about twenty-minutes too long at an hour and forty-minutes in length but despite some pacing problems that bog down the middle part of the film, there's a lot to like about this turkey. First of all, the restaurant where Lynch bangs the blonde in the bathroom? It's the same restaurant where that ridiculously patriotic speech in Samurai Cop is staged. There are other familiar locations used throughout the movie and, of course, a few returning cast members.
Speaking of which, as a vehicle for Harold Diamond, this movie is kind of great. Diamond doesn't have much range at all and he's remarkably consistent in his poor wardrobe choices in this film but he's really good at kicking people in the face and lifting pre-pubescent boys onto rooftops. He previously appeared in Andy Sidaris' Picasso Trigger and Hard Ticket To Hawaii and he also had a bit part in Rambo III but this role puts him front and center in what had to be the most challenging role of his career… squaring off against the mighty Z'Dar! The two would also appear in Shervan's Gypsy a year later but here, we get to see them square off 'like men' in the inevitable finale. As to Z'dar himself? He's basically the other male lead here and he makes the most out of the plentiful screen time allotted to his character. He gets to boss everyone around and yell a lot to the point where his eyes bug out of his head and he generally just chews through the scenery like a lawnmower, making his work here a lot of fun to watch. Jim Brown's role isn't very big and he basically mumbles his way through it with a notable lack of enthusiasm - the movie belongs to Diamond and Z'Dar, with special mention also going to the WTF turns provided by Joselito Rescober as the Japanese Mexican doctor and Jimmy Williams as the simpleton Uncle Loony.
Gratuitous nudity (including a Z'Dar love scene!). Stilted and remarkably nonsensical dialogue. A bad and irritatingly repetitive synth score. Wooden fight choreography. Bad sound effects. Recycled dialogue, actors and locations. Amazingly terrible hair and clothing choices. It's all here and more. It never quite reaches the hallucinatory heights that Samurai Cop does but there are moments where it comes very close. Despite the pacing problems, however, the good definitely outweighs the bad and Killing American Style (don't want to spoil the reasoning behind the title but it's rad) turns out to be a really entertaining Z-grade action movie.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Killing American Style arrives on DVD from Cinema Epoch in a brand new anamorphic widescreen transfer taken from the film's original negative. All in all, it looks decent on DVD. There are a few spots where the colors show a bit of age related and things tend to look a little brownish at times, particularly in the indoor scenes. Overall the image is clean, stable and nicely detailed even if sometimes skin looks a little too smooth. Black levels are pretty good. Mild print damage is present throughout the duration of the movie but it's never distracting. There are a few spots, the most obvious being around the sixty-three minute mark, where warmer colors suffer some sort of intense contrast boost. See the screen cap here. This also results in a few spots where muzzle flashes are bright blue and the sunlight looks hot blue/white. Strange. This isn't a constant, but it's noticeable.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo sound mix, in English, is also okay considering the source material. Levels jump around a bit on the menus so keep the remote handy. There are also some traces of hiss present throughout but these are minor. It's a pretty safe bet that most of this is source related but the issues are there. The dialogue is easy enough to understand and the score sounds decent enough too, at least as decent as a hokey late eighties synth score can sound. There are no alternate language options or subtitles provided.
Aside from a slide show advertising other Cinema Epoch releases and the requisite menus and chapter stops we get a twenty-minute video interview with Alexander Virdon, the man who played Jesse in the movie. He talks about how he got involved with Shervan and wound up making three movies with him, how seriously or not seriously people took things on set during the production and how he and Robert Z'Dar became good friends. He also talks about what he's been up to since he got out of acting and how he feels about the audience that has developed around some of Shervan's films over the years. He also talks about how and why the director spelled his name wrong in the credits.
The Final Word:
While Shervan's wacky directorial stamp is all over Killing American Style, what makes it stand out even more are the performances from Harold Diamond and the mighty Z'Dar. This is pretty screwy stuff and it's great to see it on DVD in a decent presentation.
