★★
“Doesn’t deliver what the cover promises – though, how could it?”
Half a point added for the lurid sleeve, an absolute classic of exploitation, that certainly lurid-ed us (“us?” says Chris – okay, me…) into purchasing, even as I knew it would disappoint. And I was not, er, disappointed in my disappointment. There’s a slight hint of Alias about the plot, in which an agent (Ager) with a penchant for wigs, discovers her father (Estevez) is in the same organization, and that she might not have been working on the side of the angels. It diverges sharply when she is ordered to kill him, along with a training camp for assassins that badly overstays its welcome. [Though it has a decent start, where the would-be hitmen have to cut the patriotic bull and admit they just like killing people.]
Ager can’t cut it as an action heroine at all, and the explosions and auto work come from stuntmen’s demo reels: note in particular the sudden colour change of the car driven by the heroine and her father. Estevez and Folger provide decent support, though it’d have been much better if someone – perhaps the guy who designed the sleeve? – had checked the script for painfully glaring plot-holes. My personal favourite? At the end, the heroine, in a blonde wig, gets a new ID from a supplier, who professes not to recognise her…even though the new ID has her blonde photo! Wouldn’t surprise me if “Gerald Cain” was a pseudonym for producer Fred Olen Ray, though it lacks the tongue-in-cheek approach which usually perks up his work. This film certainly needs something to enliven it.
Dir: Gerald Cain
Star: Suzanne Ager, Joe Estevez, Richard Folmer, Tom Bertino