Sweet Justice (1993)

★½
“Well, that’s 1 Gb of disk-space I won’t get ba… [Delete] Oh, never mind.”

Sunny Justice (Carter) is a former soldier, who is somewhat estranged from her sister, but who returns to town when the sibling – who also happens to be the mayor – dies under mysterious circumstances [savaged by a dog]. Turns out she was about to blow the whistle on developer Billy Joe Rivas (Gorshin), who has both designs on the town, and who has been using his mine as a dump for toxic-waste. The local sheriff (Singer) had bedded both sisters, but he refuses to act, and federal authorities prove no willing, so Sunny calls up some of her old pals, who were part of an all-female Special Forces unit, to take matters into their own hands. Rivas doesn’t take kindly to having his money-making scheme interfered with, and calls in reinforcements of his own, using his East-coast mob connections.

Awful. Mind-numbingly awful. Carter is best known as the female lead in Tremors, one of our all-time favourites, but this is a terrible combination of bad acting, poor scripting and terrible action sequences. It can’t even make up its mind what it wants to be, with a couple of sex scenes that don’t even have any nudity. Meanwhile, the largest-breasted ex-Special Forces girl (Michelle McCormick) is working as a go-go dancer. Not that she shows any flesh either, though I was amused by the way the inevitable training montage is interrupted for an entirely gratuitous hot-tub scene.

None of the actresses are convincing as ex-soldiers, having arms like twigs, though there is sporadically some half-decent martial-arts action. My interest was briefly piqued when Sunny uttered the immortal line, “I want to put the squad back together,” but there are just too many moments worthy of scorn for this to last. The two dog-attack sequences could hardly have been less credible if they’d just lobbed a Chihuahua at the victims using a catapult, and the final battle consists almost entirely of stuntmen falling off roofs out of shot. I’m left to presume Cynthia Rothrock must have rejected this one, and she was entirely right to do so.

Dir: Allen Plone
Star: Finn Carter, Frank Gorshin, Marc Singer, Kathleen Kinmont

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