Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 7:1	Budget Medium

At first I was not going to bother reviewing this movie. Really it is nothing special, it is neither so bad that it is painful to watch nor so good that I think everyone should watch it. It does however have Wings Hauser, Bo Hopkins, George Kennedy, Kimberly Beck and Brion James. Between them they have 616 movie credits. We are talking serious B movie cred here. Plus we have explosions, car chases, gun play, helicopters and green blood. Though we are notably lacking in nudity.

As the movie starts we see Brion James spiking the local water supply with some green luminous liquid. After the intro, we are introduced to Wings Hauser and Kimberly Beck who play Ken and Cheri Griffiths a couple driving a Starfire motor home on a vacation trip. How do I know it is a Starfire? Well besides seeing the name on the back of it about a half dozen times, someone actually says to Wings "was that your Starfire back there". Anyway, they pick up Bo Hopkins and it is all Cheri can do to keep from jumping his bones the minute he gets in the vehicle. They pull off the road into a small town to get some food and calmly watch one of he locals stab the waitress with a fork. Eventually they get around to trying to help the screaming woman and Bo finally has to shoot the guy in the leg to keep him shooting the sheriff's deputy. Meanwhile, George Kennedy makes a pot of coffee. George gets to the crime scene and gets all buddy-buddy with Bo who turns out to be an ex-lawman turned vigilante and is ethier tracking down or trying to stay away from a bad guy. Suddenly our local loony steals a cop car and drives away. He runs down a woman in curlers and starts shooting at cars which obligingly blow up. As our heroes catch up with him again, another deputy arrives on the scene who may as well have had a target drawn on his shirt. Seriously, you know this guy is deadmeat the instant you see him. As soon as he says "let me talk to him", George should have just shot him then and there. About 15 seconds later the deputy is dead and George has killed the local loony. Wings and Kim try to leave town only to have their Starfire die at the city limits. Wings immediately diagnoses a dead battery and they walk back to town lugging along a shotgun. Yup, a shotgun. Someone stops to give him a ride, which makes me think that spiking the water supply to make the townsfolk crazy might not have been necessary. I mean, who stops to give a hitchhiker a ride when he is carrying a shotgun? Our heroes all reunite at the cop shop and immediately realize that the town's water supply has been contaminated. After a few explosions and gratuitous violence, the black vans pull into the center of town and start torching the place. More cars obligingly explode. Our heroes fight back and there is a showdown at the drive-in theater during which George catches on fire and jumps into a van which obligingly explodes. The surviving heroes saddle up horses the next morning and chase after the remaining black van and soon find it and shoot it up. This van does not explode despite being shot dozens of time. Our heroes have time for a quick search of the van and decide that the only reason the bad guys would leave the van there was if they were planning on destroying the evidence. As they run away, the van obligingly explodes. The very scenic horse chase continues (yes, the bad guys have a stash of horses too) and Wings manages to get himself shot. Bo continues the chase by himself while the bad guy makes things easier by shooting all his henchmen. After spending about five minutes shooting at each other, a helicopter shows up to help the bad guy. Not to be outdone, a helicopter with rocket launchers shows up to backup Bo. As the copters chase each other, the good copter shoots at the bad copter but keeps missing and hitting cars that obligingly blow up. Finally the bad guy stays very, very still and the good copter blows him out of the sky. Meanwhile Bo wounds the bad guy and feds him a lethal dose of his own potion. The next day, Wings and Kim stop to pick up Bo who is hitching a ride out of town despite the attention of the cute female sheriff.

There are a lot of good things in the movie. I have always said "Don't bring a knife to a gun fight" and Wings and Bo also abide by this rule. After his motorhome breaks down, the only thing Wings hauls back to town is a double barrel shotgun. Bo, not to be outdone, manages to get a helicopter as backup.

And explosions. Nearly everything explodes in this movie, motorcycles, cars, vans, helicopters I was hoping that one of the horses would catch a stray round and explode, but the director decided not to go in that direction. But the horses were about the only thing that did not go up in flames.

Which brings us to the chase scenes. In town there is very little chasing going on and when the good guys finally go chasing after the bad guys, they go on horseback and suddenly we seem to have a bit of travelogue cinema going on. It is like the cinematographer cared more for the scenery than the actors and we have long shots of people riding through the badlands. One thing I will say about this movie, it is very well photographed.

I have also previously talked about using scale models instead of the much more expensive (and dangerous) full sized vehicles. In this case, we have helicopter models that are hard to tell from the real thing except when they blow up. There seems to be a B movie rule that if you have a helicopter in a movie, it has to blow up. This is much like the B movie rule that if you have a plane in the movie, you must watch it land.

Other amusing bits from the movie:

More B movie rules:

Hitch hikers are either:

1. Maniacal murders with semi-supernatural powers.

2. Exposition Guy who fills in the backstory and usually warns the cannon fodder not to go where they are going.

3. Cannon fodder, he is just there to get shot, beaten, stabbed, electrocuted, or chopped up. Sometimes rules 2 and 3 are combined.

4. Good guy. Usually has a troubled past involving the military or government and is usually a loose cannon.

So after all that, is the movie worth watching? Nah, not really. It is great fun to see so many B movie stars in one place, but the movie lacks any inspired madness. The plot is really stupid, but the bad guys are never really defined. Brion James does not say a word in the movie, so does not make for a very compelling villain. There are several references to old time cowboy movies, but none of them are really compelling, mentioning the OK Corral or High Noon does not a western make. Still, there is something to be said for a movie with so many B movie stars in it.

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