Ministry of Vengeance challenges the pacifist faith of Rev. David Miller (John Schneider, The Dukes of Hazzard) when terrorists slaughter his family at the Rome airport. Ned Beatty (Deliverance) and George Kennedy (Cool Hand Luke) play fellow ministers. The Final Alliance brings Will Colton (David Hasselhoff, Baywatch) and his pet puma home to battle a motorcycle gang led by the albino Ghost (John Saxon, Enter the Dragon). A humanoid robot breaks out of the laboratory and hits the streets of Dallas ready to administer its own glitchy brand of justice in R.O.T.O.R.. Hangfire burns when Sheriff Ike Slayton (Brad Davis, Midnight Express) and National Guard Colonel Johnson (Jan-Michael Vincent, The Mechanic) clash when escaped convicts take hostages in a small town. Corrupt cop Franklin L. Severance (George Segal, The Hot Rock) chases after wrongly convicted killer Wellman Santee (Dolph Lundgren, The Expendables) in Joshua Tree.
What We Thought:
Enter The Video Store: Video Vengeance is a collection of five films you probably rented back in the day starring at least one named actor and probably some combination of George Kennedy, Ned Beatty, George Segal or James Tolkan.
I’ll start with what I consider the best of the five, Joshua Tree starring Dolph Lundgren, Kristian Alfonso, and George Segal. As a Lundgren fan I’ve been a fan of the movie since the 1990s. Lundgren plays a truck driver falsely convicted of killing a cop who escapes during a prisoner transportation run. He takes Alfonso hostage not realizing she’s a cop as well. Segal is dirty and wants him dead. Lundgren did a bunch of these Straight-to-Video action flicks and I’ve seen most of them. It’s not great, but the driving sequences are pretty good and the big action set piece at the warehouse is pretty neat too.
Second we have R.O.T.O.R. which is actually worse than I remember it being. It’s a poor man’s RoboCop with some Judge Dredd and The Terminator. It’s basically a combination of all of the 80s science fiction/robot flicks. The lead scientist guy who also happens to be a cop (because that’s possible) is just terrible. His fighting sequences are awful and his acting is bad too. The R.O.T.O.R. character is too robotic and lacks the personality that made RoboCop and The Terminator great. I’m pretty sure it has a cult following because it’s definitely a cult styled film.
Speaking of cult, do you remember the David Hasselhoff with a puma movie The Final Alliance? Yeah you read that right, The Hoff with a puma. Hasselhoff plays a Marine who everyone thought died as a kid, but goes back to his family home with a puma. The small town is controlled by a biker gang and The Hoff is ready to take them on. With overly choreographed kicking and punching that would make Steven Seagal proud, the film is so bad it’s good…well at least watchable to laugh at.
Ministry of Vengeance stars the Dukes of Hazzard’s John Schneider as a Vietnam soldier turned priest who somehow has a wife and daughter who get gunned down in a terrorist attack at an airport in Rome. When the US government won’t do anything about hunting down the terrorist, he does a camp with his former ‘Nam partner (James Tolkan), remembers his training and heads to the Middle East to get his revenge. George Kennedy and Ned Beatty have roles in it as well.
Last we have Hangfire, another prison escape movie. This time Tolkan is part of the prisoners who escape and try to take over a small town. The local sheriff and his ‘Nam buddy try to defend it and save his wife and father-in-law, but then the National Guard shows up and Jan-Michael Vincent wants to do things his own way and gets a lot of people killed.
Joshua Tree is the only film in the collection I’ve seen more than 2 or 3 times. It’s the only one I genuinely like, but I also have a soft spot for Straight-to-Video flicks so I actually think this is a cool collection. If you like 80s and 90s action movies with guns that never run out of ammo and guys kicking each other that you can see coming a mile away then you’ll love this.
Special features include original lossless stereo audio on The Final Alliance, Hangfire, and Joshua Tree, and original lossless mono audio on Ministry of Vengeance and R.O.T.O.R.; optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing; a collectors’ perfect-bound book; audio commentaries on each film; the R-rated and unrated cuts of Joshua Tree; an alternate ending of Joshua Tree; brand new interviews with John Schneider, Bill Blair, Ken Foree, director Vic Armstrong, and others; features on the history of direct-to-video, the Vietnam veteran genre and Robo Schlock; archival interviews with director Vic Armstrong and producer Andy Armstrong; trailers; and image galleries.
