Capital Punishment

Rating:
Summary: Bad
Review: If you've read my other reviews of Gary Daniels' movies, you'll know I'm about one thing: Gary Daniels himself. He's one of the prettiest, most watchable men on film. So I bought this DVD just to see him in it.

Sorry, but this movie is a turkey that wouldn't fly even if Frank Perdue were running after it with an axe. It is so low-budget that it appears the producer could not afford to buy a plot. It consists mostly of very darkly lit martial arts fight scenes interspersed with snippets of pointlessly meandering dialogue whose only purpose seems to get some "unknowns" their Screen Actor's Guild union cards. It's like watching Wrestlemania from the 100th row of some dark stadium, but without the benefit of dry ice smoke and shooting fireworks to alert you to the end of one fight, and start of the next.

The "acting" and "script" is so turgidly bad that it sounds like the director woke the cast up at 4 AM after all had an evening of intense alcohol consumption, shoved a camera in front of their yawning faces, and made them improvise their lines with ear muffs on so that they couldn't hear what their fellow "actors" were saying. David Carradine is listed in the credits, but he appears sporadically and randomly, and spends the majority of his time yelling into a phone at some subordinate. (I think that the director may have been filming David cursing at his agent for making him take this role).

The DVD video quality is poor -- dark, murky, and grainy as if it was a copy from a VHS tape forceably inserted into, and "played" upon, a Sony Betamax machine. It has no special features, no closed captioning, no languages other than english. It does have scene selection, but this movie is so bad that the only scene you'd want to select is the ending credits.

Ok, one good thing about it: It has Gary Daniels in it. Unfortunately, it has Gary with a pony tail and bad split ends. I guess that the producer couldn't have afforded to spend $5 sending Gary to the mall for a haircut, because that would have consumed the entire music budget which sounds like it consisted of purchasing a 1970's vintage Kraftwerk 33 1/3 vinyl LP recording and playing it on a turntable that has 16 RPM. Gary is a whole lot prettier in his other movies (and his looks have improved with age -- he's more muscular and his facial features are more handsome now than in this early movie), so skip this one unless you like pain and your dentist's drill doesn't do it for you any more.