Review: Killpoint

In what is absolutely not a forerunner to “Rush Hour”, Cop and widower Leo Fong teams up with ATF agent Richard Roundtree to take down nutty crime lord Cameron Mitchell and his arms dealer cohort named Nighthawk (Stack Pierce). Hope Holliday turns up as a madam, James Lew is a henchman, and that’s a young, baby-faced Branscombe Richmond talking to Fong in a locker room at one point. You’ve seen him get beaten up by most of your favourite 80s action heroes at some point. It’s his thing.

 

Producer-star-golem Leo Fong combines with “Aftershock” director Frank Harris in this 10c action movie from 1984. Harris also scripts, produces, edits, and serves as cinematographer here. Co-star Hope Holliday serves as casting director and associate producer due to the apparent advice of her friend and co-star Cameron Mitchell, having produced several other Mitchell 80s cheapies as well. What’s my point? This whole film plays like a bunch of slumming colleagues and friends got together to provide the barest of minimums – at best – in order to make a quick, shamelessly cynical buck off the seriously undemanding. Fred ‘Hammer’ Williamson isn’t involved here (Having earlier worked with Fong for the oddball but mediocre “Blind Rage”), but this movie is still bargain bin junk reminiscent of one of The Hammer’s ‘Po Boy Productions. It’s terrible on all fronts.

 

Director Harris is obsessed with close-ups of Fong’s blank stare, which reveals nothing. Fong has zero acting ability, charisma, or premise. Nada. Zip. Zilch. He severely lacks energy or any emotional investment and frankly looks more like a high school maths teacher than a bad arse. Sadly, on evidence here and in “Blind Rage” (which he produced and co-wrote) he doesn’t seem to have any abilities on the other side of the filmmaking process either unless helping to churn out cheap, cynical product counts (It doesn’t). Harris is the real ‘star’ here though, his filmmaking incompetence is on show throughout. One scene shows the same shot of actor/fight choreographer (along with Fong) James Lew over and over, at least three times. Later we get random martial arts footage for no other reason than padding, and what’s with that random bit of narration towards the end of the film from Mitchell coming out of nowhere? A scene between two lawmen on the phone has one of them very clearly and very monotonously reading their lines. They’re like two admin workers at a box factory. Turns out they were real-life cops, presumably technical advisors on the film. One actor playing a pawn shop owner is so bad he might just have been an actual pawn shop owner who was handed the script about two minutes prior. Taking into account the participation of real cops mentioned above, and given the pawn shop guy’s character name is Bernie, is played by a guy named Bernie Nelson in his only IMDb credit, I reckon I’m probably right. Later we get some guy we don’t know getting shot by some other guy we don’t know. Eventually we learn that one of them was a snitch and that Mitchell hired the other to dispatch them. Why not set that up beforehand? Amateur hour.

 

Similar to Fong, Stack Pierce has a stone face and no discernible acting talent on show here. He’s got a deep voice but looks painfully bored and talks slower than Droopy. He’s one of the worst actors with a decent-sized resumé I’ve ever seen. 113 acting credits, including “Cool Breeze”, “WarGames”, and “A Rage in Harlem”. Here he plays a villain named Nighthawk, and I’d just like to say that it’s completely unfair that a guy already named Stack Pierce gets to play a guy with the even cooler sounding name of Nighthawk. Even a coasting Richard Roundtree in his stock cop role is 10 times more convincing than Fong and Pierce without seemingly trying. He’s just here to get paid for about 10 minutes of screen time like with almost every other role he accepted in the 80s and early 90s. Playing William Sadler to Pierce’s John Amos (for all you “Die Hard 2” fans out there) is Cameron Mitchell, a mainstay of absolutely shit 80s films. Sunglasses-sporting Mitchell shows up having a hoot and a half shooting at TVs and playing with a little dog. I don’t know if he ever had a cocaine and booze phase but if he did it surely included this film. I wouldn’t even be surprised if he was being filmed at his own home. At any rate, Mitchell and a pretty decent Hope Holliday are the only fun you’re going to have with this terrible cheapie. Sadly, Holliday’s role is a mere cameo before she and Pierce blast away at each other in a bizarrely quickly escalating incident. Oh, and remember those two guys that shot at each other? Well Pierce goes and shoots the one guy who shot the other guy because this movie has more senseless shooting than Walter Hill’s “Last Man Standing”. Sadly, even the fighting is uninteresting here. Lew’s a talented hand, but there’s not much he and Fong can do when Harris has their stuff shot in close-ups and other bad angles. You’re more worried about the camera being hit than the actors.

 

Cynical, badly cobbled together junk. Cameron Mitchell seems to be having fun, but he and Hope Holliday can’t make garbage edible. The best case scenario here is that Harris, Mitchell, and Fong wanted to give their friends some work, but this just comes off as so pathetic and poorly done. Fong might think of himself as a martial arts Charles Bronson, but even at his worst Bronson wasn’t quite this boring.

 

Rating: D-