Hulk Hogan - Der Hammer

it was late one halloween night I had fallen asleep with my TV on and I woke up like 2 in the morning, opened my eyes and this movie was playing. I was a little groggy, but was then awake and couldnt get back to sleep and figured might as well watch this. the thing that surprised me, is, this movie is standard fair as far as fish out of water fighting against incredible odds to win something movies go, but I just LOVED the look of this movie. it was filmed very beaituflly, with some very surreal scenes. such as that rough bar hulk went to and got intoa fight, the look of the bar with the lights shining thru the walls and the colorful look of it really caught my eye. from then on, the strange thing was, while I wasnt incredibly taken with the plot, I thought the film itself, as far as the scenes was really....well........sharp and cool.

What a horrible, horrible, horrible movie. The plot is paper thin, the acting sucks, and there's nothing redeemable about this movie at all. Seeing this movie is almost as painful as getting a root canal without anesthetic. Even die hard wrestling fans (like myself) want to forget it ever existed. It's just a horrible reminder of the wretched rock 'n wrestling connection, and the most selfish wrestler ever to take a year off to do a horrible movie that started the lamest feud, and some of the worst matches of the 80's and part of the 90's. -***** stars out of *****

I haven't seen this since it came out, so I revisited it on TUBI. It still stinks after all these years. The biggest problem is Hulk Hogan can't act. He's one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, but that doesn't translate to the screen at all. He's painfully bad. His acting is often unintentionally funny. The sign he gives as "Rip" is silly and hackish. His love scenes with Joan Severance are silly, too, mainly due to his bad acting and having no chemistry with Joan on screen.

The supporting players, mainly Kurt Fuller and his 2 associates, are pretty good and are often funny. The scene where all 3 of them enter the dive bar is actually pretty funny and is intended to be so. That one scene is the best in the film. Tiny Lister is pretty ominous as Zeus, Hogan's rival. Joan Severance is gorgeous and deserves to be in a better movie. Despite Hogan's massive popularity in the wrestling world at the time, the film bombed despite massive promotion by WWF/WWE, and now is considered a bad cult classic. Don't bother unless you're a fan of bad movies.

Let's face it, "No Holds Barred was a movie made to cash in on the big wave of Hulkamania and for the kids who were fans of Hulk Hogan, it must have been a dream come true. For anyone else, "No Holds Barred" is a painfully stupid watch with plot so unbelievably dumb and requiring such huge amounts of suspension of disbelief to even partly accept it as a reality. It does resemble a movie, but that's almost all it has going for it. To anyone who saw this as a kid, it may be nostalgic, but to any wrestling fans or people looking for a "so bad it's good movie" this is not it. It has a few scenes of that kind which will make you laugh in disbelief, but other than that, it has nothing going for it. Watch only if you are gigantic wrestling/Hulk Hogan fan or don't mind killing your brain cells. 5/10!

Hulk Hogan must have gotten other movie offers from other studios - so upon seeing his choice for his first starring role, you have to wonder why on earth he picked this one! Could the other offers been even worse than this? Seeing that the "trivia" section for this movie states that he found the original draft unsatisfying and rewrote it without credit, you also have to wonder how it was originally.

Whatever the case, the end results are really bad... but so bad that they are often hilarious to watch. Now, the movie was done somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the acting is so over the top... the plot is so simple-minded and unbelievable... that you can't accept the majority of the hilarity as intentional.

If you can stop laughing long enough to study the movie, you'll see just how badly made it is. The editing is terrible - it's obvious a good number of scenes (containing a good amount of explanation) are missing, and other scenes are clearly chopped down to a fraction of their original length. This may explain why there's barely a feeling Hogan is the star of the movie - there are long stretches when he's nowhere in sight, and he actually doesn't get to do as much as you might think. (It doesn't help that in some long shots, he appears to be replaced by a double.) And while Hogan seems to have aimed the movie towards his youthful fans, the violence level (including attempted rape, savage beatings, and death) makes the movie a questionable choice for this age group.