MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE BLACK DOG

February is the shortest month of the year and so I plan only a very short intro followed by a shorter that what you're probably used to Foyeurism. First of all, if you missed the first edition of the Foycast you can check it out by CLICKING HERE. You can also listen to the second edition of the Foycast, the majority of which is devoted to myself and Dread Central's Uncle Creepy discussing Uwe Boll's IN THE NAME OF THE KING. You might actually be surprised to hear what we have to say about Dr. Boll's fantasy flick featuring epic shoveling. You can listen to FOYCAST II: IN THE NAME OF THE BOLL by CLICKING HERE. Keep an eye on Dread Central around Valentine's Day when the third edition of the Foycast will probably be rearing its ugly head. And now onto our main even of the evening.

 

 

Let me tell you about ACTION U.S.A.

Never heard of it, huh? Not too surprising since ACTION U.S.A. is a rare little gem, unquestionably one of the best kept secrets in all of action filmdom. This little b-actioner is a goldmine for those that love cheeseball action films the way they used to make'em. It's a fast-paced chase flick with little down time wasted on annoying things like plot points or character development - not unlike most action flicks these days. Though made and released direct-to-video in 1988, ACTION U.S.A. feels low rent in a Seventies drive-in sort of way - I say that in a good way; and because it is so unpolished and rough around the edges one can more easily forgive its goofiness and shortcomings more so than you could with what we get in today's hyper-stylized action movies. This is not some slickly-produced modern Hollywood production, it wasn't shot and edited like some hyperactive video game or directed with music video pretension, and it doesn't suffer from that pompous atmosphere of faux cool that most action movies have carried themself with since the onset of the Bay-Bruckheimer era of action moviemaking.

Try to imagine if you will a LETHAL WEAPON knock-off made for the Joe Bob Briggs drive-in movie crowd. That's about the best description of ACTION U.S.A. I can come up with. Instead of crazy Riggs and by-the-book Murtaugh we have the mixed race pairing of Osborn and McKinnon. They're pretty much Mel Gibson and Danny Glover even though they're not exactly the same as the LETHAL WEAPON combo: they're federal agents instead of LA cops, they already get along so there's none of that mismatched buddy cop stuff, McKinnon is not a family man who constantly bemoans how he's getting too old for this shit, Osborn is just sort of depressed instead of suicidal, and they never ever change their clothes. Osborn always wears an Army green jacket and t-shirt combination and McKinnon never changes out of his suit. In fact, so dedicated is McKinnon to keeping that suit on as a second skin that even when he eventually gets shot, hospitalized, and then abducted from his hospital bed he'll still be wearing the same exact suit.

The swankiness of a Sears business suit meets the finest Army Surplus wear in ACTION U.S.A.

The role of Osborn (who looks, dresses, has the same hair as, and even smokes just like Mel Gibson did in the first two LETHAL WEAPON movies) is played by actor Gregory Scott Cummings. Action fans may remember Cummings as the military helicopter pilot assisting the evil biker gang in STONE COLD who got blown up during the climax when a runaway chopper of the bike variety kamikazied his chopper of the whirlybird variety. Gregory Scott Cummings is a character actor you usually see playing villainous characters, so seeing him in the Mel Gibson role here is kind of unexpected. This is one of the only good guy roles I've ever seen him in. Only other one I can think of off the top of my head was as a doomed soldier in one of the WATCHERS sequel.

McKinnon is Osborn's straight-laced black partner played by a longtime bit part TV actor named William Hubbard Knight; the guy sort of looks like Billy Dee Williams if Billy Dee were your average-looking, mild-mannered, high school math teacher. McKinnon is nicknamed "Panama" for reasons not explained until much later in the film: he grew up in an unhappy poor family in Newark, New Jersey that wanted out and Panama was the furthest place they could think of, so they nicknamed their son "Panama". Yeah, I fully realize that explanation is pretty weak and really doesn't make much sense when it comes right down to it, but that's not a problem here since ACTION U.S.A. was never designed to be a thinking man's movie. The deepest thoughts that'll cross your mind during this one will probably be something along the lines of, "Why did that explode?"

You better believe a whole lot of stuff explodes in the movie, often for no particular reason other than the filmmakers had the means to make it combustible and figured it would blow up real good. Car flips over... BOOM! Car hits another car... BOOM! Car drives through a house... BOOM! Not the car, mind you - the house!

Unlike THE MARINE, the combustible elements contribute to the camp factor. Also unlike THE MARINE, the explosions aren't nearly as numerous, most likely due to this film just not having the budget to detonate half a state, so when they do occur they have more impact rather than just leaving one saying, "Oh, look; another small chunk of South Carolina has erupted into a fiery holocaust."

But goodness gracious, great balls of fire indeed!

Enjoy this brief glimpse into the subconscious mind of Hal Needham

Now on the plot side of things: car chases, car chases, and more car chases! And just when you think you can't take anymore car chases - shootouts! Followed by more car chases! On special occasions we even get some foot chases, but those usually involve characters in shootouts while running to their vehicles - for more car chases!

Fast driving, a topless woman, a front door getting smashed off its hinges, someone getting beat up, hung by one leg out of a helicopter, dropped from a tremendous height into a river; a high speed car chase, a woman hanging out of a speeding car, speeding cars driving on sidewalks with people jumping for cover, a random car getting flipped over and crashing into other parked cars, a car jumping a school bus full of children and crash landing into another group of parked cars, and a car crashing thru a camper trailer that then explodes in an enormous ball of fire: all of this within just the first 10-minutes of ACTION U.S.A. You cannot accuse this movie of not living up to its namesake.

ACTION U.S.A. marked the directorial debut of John Stewart. No relation to the host of The Daily Show, this John Stewart is a longtime Hollywood stuntman and his film here is pretty much a showcase for a whole bunch of old school stuntmen to get together to make a low budget action flick where they whip out pretty much every trick in their book of classic movie stunts that the budget would allow. Imagine the movie STUNT ROCK with the concert footage and rockin' soundtrack replaced with a plot and dialogue. Dangling upside down from helicopters by their feet, hanging out the side of speeding cars, getting thrown from cars, crashing cars, crashing cars into other cars, crashing cars into buildings, blowing up cars, blowing up buildings, smashing through windows, falling from great heights, getting set on fire, shootouts, spinouts, wipeouts, punchouts, knockouts... To paraphrase the movie FIELD OF DREAMS, if you break it they will come.

A co-producer on the film was a chap by the name of Ross Hagen, a long time b-movie tough guy and maker of many a z-grade action flick on his own right. Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may know Hagen from his movie THE SIDEHACKERS. He co-stars here as an uber villainous gun-for-hire known simply as Drago. More on that shortly.

So a bunch of mob goons are after this guy named Billy who stole some diamonds from their boss. After they take him captive and dangle him out a helicopter to interrogate him - which they do in plain sight over downtown Waco, Texas without ever raising the ire of anyone down below - smart mouth Billy not only refuses to give up the location of the diamonds, Mr. Smarty Pants even keeps firing off insults at these guys who could drop him to his death at any moment. They finally do drop him into a river from an incredible height.

Falling from a tremendous height be damned, Billy climbs ashore unscathed and right into the waiting sports car being driven by his girlfriend Carmen who'd been following the copter from the ground the whole time. Billy takes the wheel, the helicopter lands, and now a car chase breaks out featuring almost every car chase cliché in the book.

Billy also uses this opportunity to drop some hints to his girlfriend about the location of the diamonds: obscure clues about Holland and windmills and someplace called the Circle K Ranch. Why doesn't he just come right out and tell her where they are instead of forcing her to play a Texas jewel thief version of Carmen Sandiego? I forgot; if he did that there wouldn't be much of a plot left.

After more vehicular calamity than that found in an entire season of "Knight Rider", Bad guys eventually capture Billy again, Carmen too. Billy gets gunned down for his insolence. Good riddance, I say. Billy was annoying and pretty much had it coming. Fortunately, our heroic federal agents will show up just in the nick of time to rescue Carmen from certain death. From this point on ACTION U.S.A.'s plot is pretty much one giant chase. What am I saying? It was already one giant chase.

The next one that says "I'm getting too old for this shit" gets it!

Come to think, ACTION U.S.A. is really more of a battle of nitwits, for lack of a better term, because the feds are incompetent and the villains even more so. Anytime one side gets the advantage over the other it's really due more to which side managed to do something so dumb it allowed the other side to capitalize on their screw-up. These feds try to protect this witness yet they keep taking her out into public places; if murderous thugs are in hot pursuit of the witness you're protecting and have already found you once it's probably not a good idea to take your star witness to the local all-you-can-eat buffet.

These bad guys are an even bigger bunch of inept bozos. Whenever they do capture the girl you better believe they're going to put themselves in positions in which she can be easily found and rescued; most of the time they only get a few feet away before she's saved from their clutches. One scene has the bad guys abducting Carmen from her hotel room and running right into Osborn in the lobby. Yeah, good idea, kidnap someone at gunpoint from a busy hotel and try taking her out the front door. And while you're at it, make sure you park your getaway vehicle several blocks away!

And then there are the coincidences, such as when the good guys and bad guys come across one another while driving down different sides of the same street out in the middle of the country, or when they'll both pull into the same gas station within moments of one another. We rarely get any sense they're actively searching for one another; they just keep ending up at the same places at the same time.

There's a great scene where Carmen, in a towel having just stepped out of the shower, goes to open the motel curtains as Osborn tells her not to because they're supposed to be hiding out in this fleabag motel room. She does so anyway and as soon as she pulls back the curtains there's this jacked-up, Latino, Freddie Mercury clone staring right back at her with a crazed look on his face. Crazed indeed, this guy smashes through the window and tackles her. The thug is immediately gunned down and his corpse falls right on top of a screaming Carmen. Though they drag Carmen out to their car with her in nothing but a towel, by the very next scene she'll suddenly be dressed in a blue mini-dress combination complete with boots that are made for walkin'. Where the hell did this little ensemble come from? More importantly, given what just happened, is this really the time to go out to eat a public eatery?

Better believe that Carmen quickly falls for the lovelorn Osborn. Billy who? She gets over that dead boyfriend real fast.

The late character actor Cameron Mitchell pops up for about a whopping 90-seconds as the mob boss who wants his diamonds back. His character is so insignificant that halfway into the film he's never seen or heard from again despite being the instigator behind everything happened. He doesn't even factor into the finale despite getting his diamonds back being what the film is supposed to be all about. Did the writers forget about him or could they not afford him for another day's work?

Mitchell's main contribution to the film - aside from answering the question as to what it would look like if you combined Tony Curtis and William Shatner into one person and then added a hundred pounds - is to call in an infamous gun-for-hire named Drago to assist his (seemingly) last two henchmen by that point: Hitch, played by long time z-movie actor Hoke Howell, and Lucky, a pint-sized pipsqueak of a goon. Both of them come across as generic country-fried cronies, the likes of which you'd have expected to see playing bad guys in a rerun of The Dukes of Hazzard or BJ & the Bear.

This woman has done things she's not proud of

Hitch and Lucky have been sent to the local airport to pick up the infamous hired gun known simply as Drago. With a name like Drago you're probably thinking he's going to look like Dolph Lundgren. Drago: you're waiting for this super-sized, European, bad ass hitman type to step off the plane. Nope. Instead we get 50-year old Ross Hagen dressed like the Marlboro Man making his grand entrance stepping out of a mini one-person biplane so lightweight he can pick it up by the tail and move it himself. Drago certainly doesn't look like the sort of chap who would have flown himself in such a dinky little plane like that; looks more like if he'd stepped out of a time machine from 1870's Dodge City. Much like the good guys, he too never changes his clothes. Heck, that Stetson he wears appears to have been glued to his head; even during fist fights it never so much as moves, let alone comes off.

But make no mistake about it - Drago is a real man's man. He looks like a bad ass cattle rancher fresh from the cover of a Louis L'Amour novel and has a voice that could give cigarettes cancer. This is a man that walks tall and carries a big stick, who has no problem slapping a woman when she needs slapping, who when he's holding a federal agent at gun point will ask the guy, "Hey, J. Edgar Hoover, how do you want to be buried: ass up or head down?", and when things come to fisticuffs he threatens to teach his opponent the "Sing Sing Slice". Drago is such a man's man that I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that instead of urine he just pissed concentrated testosterone. I'd also joke that the man is so manly that his tear drops could be used to cure erectile dysfunction but then I know full well that men like Drago don't cry. Alpha male... Drago is an Omega Male!

Alas, for all his build-up and perceived bad assery, Drago proves to be just as inept at his job as Hitch and Lucky. But you didn't hear that from me. Who would be foolish enough to tell him to his face that he sucks at his job? Not me. I know I don't wanna be taught the Sing Sing Slice. You do not want this guy welcoming you to flavor country.

Asa Buchanan stars in Louis L'Amour's THE QUIET MAN

Likewise, there's another character actor in the film playing Osborn and Panama’s FBI boss - his name escapes me, a character you just know is going to turn out to be one of the bad guys because this actor always plays bad guys. This guy never plays a good guy. Never. Never ever. Never ever ever! I was showing this movie to a friend and she immediately recognized him from other films and instantly pegged him as a bad guy. How? Because as she said: "That guy never plays good guys." And sure enough, he will turn out to be a bad guy.

Cruising the back roads of Texas, Carmen and her federal protectors will just happen to drive past a Circle K Ranch. After a few minutes of playing Encyclopedia Brown to decipher the clues the late Billy left her, they deduce the windmill (Get it: Holland? Windmills? Weak.) is where Billy hid the diamonds. Excuse me... they're "unregistered diamonds". That's the term they keep using and the reason why Panama keeps throwing out the idea that maybe the two of them should keep the diamonds themselves, quit their thankless jobs working for the federal government, and live it up. This LETHAL WEAPON combo spends less time engaging in witty "I'm too old for this shit" banter in favor of downbeat whining about how much they hate their jobs and how unhappy they are in life. Mostly McKinnon does that; Osborn just smokes cigarettes and looks like he could really use a stiff drink.

Following a car chase that lasts less than a minute due to the good guys immediately shooting out one of the bad guys' tires...

Let me interrupt for a second to make mention of another friend of mine who is such a big car guy that whenever I show him a movie he always points out the make and model of the main cars used in the film. All he could ever talk about when I showed him ACTION U.S.A. was how much he could not believe that the bad guys, regardless of the Mercedes or Duster they were driving at the time, could not take out the junky Volari driven by Osborn and Panama. As he put it, "It's just got a six; why can't they run it off the road?" For the record, he noted that most of the vehicles wrecked in the movie were Chryslers. I don't know what, if anything, that means, but I thought I'd pass it along.

The Rent-A-Wrecks & The Furious

A bullet in the engine block forces the good guys to make a stop at a country western night club. Osborn decides to try working on the car outside, while Panama and Carmen go in to find a phone to touch base with the fed head. Good plan: send a black man into a Texas redneck bar with a white woman. Nah, no way this could ever end in violence. Not surprisingly, nearly every cowboy in the bar looks at him like they're ready to get a noose.

Osborn spots the three henchmen pull up and hurries inside the club to warn the others. Osborn decides the best way to cover their tracks and not be seen is with a distraction, and by distraction he means punching out the closest cowboy next to him. Being that this is a redneck bar in an action movie and there's no way in hell a movie like this is going to forget to include a bar fight scene, everyone in the club starts immediately wailing on the person closest to them. It's a redneck bar in a cheesy action flick - I'm shocked everyone wasn't already brawling the moment they walked in the door. Osborn holds his own but poor Panama keeps getting used as a human lawn dart.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the club, Carmen decides to remain inconspicuous by jumping on stage to sing with the house band. Everyone on the dance floor loves her song, a song the house band somehow managed to instantly ascertain the right musical chords and beat to play along to. Everyone watching her seems completely oblivious to the fact that there's a full scale riot taking place on the other side of the bar mere feet from them.

When the dust settles, Carmen gets a standing ovation, Panama has been beaten senseless, the bad guys decide since they couldn't find the girl (hiding in plain sight) they might as well take Osborn hostage, and somewhere a young Simon Cowell contemplates hanging himself after having to listen to that lousy country western lounge act musical number.

Now Carmen and Panama find themselves driving around in a beat-up old pick-up truck looking to rescue Osborn. Actually, they don't go looking for Osborn to rescue him so much as they just happen to stop at the same gas station that the bad guys will drive up to moments later. This movie could have also been titled COINCIDENCE U.S.A.

All this trouble over a D&D dice bag?

I should mention that the possibly inbred-looking gas station attendant appeared to be dressed in an F-Troop uniform and though he only had mere seconds of screen time and one line of dialogue, it still made for one of those what-the-hell moments that makes you rewind again and again. That one line of dialogue that came out of his mouth came out as indecipherable cornpone gibberish. Did this guy escape from Mayberry's insane asylum or what?

Since there hadn't been a car chase for almost fifteen minutes, and, honestly, that this movie managed to go a full 15-minutes without a car chase is hard to fathom, it's car chase time yet again. And this one is a spectacularly silly car chase; though to be honest, spectacularly silly pretty much describes every car chase in ACTION U.S.A.

Drago will clumsily fall out of the Duster when he leans out the window to get a shot off. Hitch then gets shot and keels over on the wheel. In the backseat Osborn grabs Lucky and the two of them - backwards and head first, mind you - go crashing through the back windshield making it look like the glass was made of rock salt. It probably was. The two of them will tussle atop the trunk of the car - that is amazingly driving in a relatively straight line despite the driver being slumped over the wheel - in a battle that reminded me greatly of a Simpsons episode where Homer and the criminal Snake wrestled on the hood of a speeding car. Osborn sends Lucky packing and jumps to the pick-up now being driven by Carmen because Panama actually managed to get shot during the exchange. The seemingly dead Hitch magically awakens just in time to scream "I'll see you in hell!" before meeting a fiery explosive fate crashing into a gas struck stretched out across the highway for no particular reason. What makes this fiery explosive death all the more special is that the car clearly explodes and flips through the air well before it reaches the fuel-fueled target it was supposed to ram into and then explode. Pyrotechnics isn't always an exact science, I guess.

They saved the best car chase for last, even though it isn't the actual end of the movie. Osborn and Carmen are being chased by Drago and Lucky; they keep running innocent motorists off the road to crash in Hal Needham-like fashion. One car crashes through the side of a house; the occupant on the front lawn screams, "Hey, that was my bedroom!" at the driver, who stops just long enough to laughingly apologize and then drives off like nothing just happened. Suddenly, without warning or any logical reason for doing so, the house explodes. What the hell was in that bedroom? A waterbed filled with gasoline?

The longer this chase goes on more random motorists will crash into things; most of those things will then explode. The movie will actually go out of its way to make sure you see the innocent motorist driving the vehicle getting away before everything erupts in a fiery holocaust though. They do not, however, go out of their way to make sure we don't see the stuntmen wearing crash helmets that are driving those vehicles.

We'll even get a dandy foot chase where Drago and Lucky, currently in possession of the hot potato (i.e. Carmen), decide to follow the movie cliché that Roger Ebert likes to call "the climbing villain". It's two against one and a federal agent is after you so why not duck into a multi-story building and begin climbing up to its highest floor? Besides, if they hadn't then we'd never have gotten to see Lucky take the Nestea death plunge from one of the top floors. His fall is shown in slow motion so slow that the people shown running for cover below, the ones next to the car Lucky will fatally crash down onto, I do believe they would have had enough time to actually get in the car and move it before he smashed onto the hood.

But you won't hear me complain. This is all part of the stuff that makes ACTION U.S.A. so much damn fun. This film doesn't possess an ounce of irony or "look how cool I am" smugness. It's just 90-minutes of flying-by-the-seat-of-our-pants 1970's retro action transplanted into the late 1980's and it's positively brimming with giddy enthusiasm. That this film isn't more well known amongst afficianados of action movies is a damn shame.

Osborn takes the girl to go meet up with his boss on a bridge out in the country where, as stated earlier, he turns out to be a bad guy who has decided that, like Panama earlier, he deserves to steal the diamonds after all his years of thankless service for the ungrateful United States government. Osborn's at gunpoint and Panama's been kidnapped out of his hospital bed and strapped into a car in a small ravine off to the side that's been wired with explosives which the FBI baddie can trigger if Osborn tries anything funny. Fortunately, the day is saved thanks to Carmen and her uncanny ability to whip up Molotov cocktails in a matter of seconds using some beer bottles and a gas can found in the back of that junky pick-up truck.

Cars start exploding. Dirty federal agents burst into flames and go jumping over the side of the bridge. Drago grabs the bag with the diamonds, guns down a fed that looked amazingly like an 80's yuppie version of Harry Potter, and attempts to escape via dirt bike only to get machine gunned in the back by the fed villain, and then he and the dirt bike both go flying off the side of the bridge on fire. What an unceremonious demise for such a man's man. And we never did find out what the Sing Sing Slice was either. Dammit!

Osborn finally shoots and kills his crooked boss, but not before the guy pushes the button to blow up Panama. The camera pans in on Osborn at the very moment he hilariously screams...

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But it's all going to be okay because the bound and gagged Panama, the guy who was hospitalized with a near fatal gunshot wound just the night before, somehow managed to escape the car unnoticed before it exploded. And it's really all going to be okay because Osborn had the diamonds in his pocket all along. Carmen and Osborn start making out. They all decide to keep the diamonds for themselves and live happily ever after. The end. Don't you just love happy endings?

Cue a corny little 80's lite pop number titled "A Handful of Trouble", highly inappropriate given all the action we've just seen, to serenade us through the closing credits.

Anyone reading this who fancies themselves a connoisseur of action movies needs to head right over to Ebay or Half.com and get yourself a VHS copy of the awesomeness that his ACTION U.S.A. It's glorious, people, absolutely glorious. The best kept secret in b-movie action cinema: ACTION U-S-A!

Plot sold separately.

IN MEMORY OF DRAGO

DO NOT CRY FOR HIM. ONLY WUSSIES WEEP.

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE LETHAL WEAPON 4