Shadow Warriors II: Hunt for the Death Merchant

This is the first movie I saw starring Hulk Hogan. This guy really can't act at all. Add up the utterly stupid plot, conversations and action scenes and you get a helluva movie.

This piece of crap starts with a kidnapping of a girl. Hulk Hogan, here his name is Mike McBride (haha), and his moron friends are assigned to save the day. And in what manner: they go to the house of the kidnapper, who is the father of the girl, and shoot everyone and everything. Once they accomplished this mission something completely different happens. Hulk Hogan is captured by some villain who injects him with a poison that will slowly kill him within 24hours. Look at Hogan's face as he tries to act like he's really going to die. It's painfully funny. After he gets injected with the poison his friends pop up completely out of nowhere shooting all the bad guys, which of course are not American. Shannon Tweed, the "femme fatale" jumps over a sand dune on a motorcycle while killing the baddies. And so it goes on and on. Amazingly brainless and cliché action scenes followed by amazingly brainless and cliché conversations. At one point Hulk is even trying to be emotional, thinking of his "pals" who died in earlier operations. You get to see some idiotic flashbacks of dying soldiers. Then Shannon Tweed comes in to comfort him...hahahaha...this is some really bad acting.

The bad guy is so tremendously evil it becomes a joke. Everything he says, does and thinks is pure evil. And of course he's Russian, what else... His sidekick is even worse. Some kinda gorilla-a-like monster who does everything 'the boss' says. Of course, further on in the movie Hulkie and this mean machine get in a nasty fight with each other.

In the end, after a lot of dim-witted, extremely unbelievable action scenes and other crap, you see Hulk Hogan and his moron crew (one character is called Andy Powers btw, djeezes), walking side by side, way too cool, with in the background a big explosion. Hellooo....... Oh, I almost forgot the hilarious scene with the brainsick madman in the helicopter going completely nuts throwing grenates at the 'bad people'like he's Santa handing out candy to children. Luckely, every grenate takes out a couple of baddies, thrown away in a real old-school McGyverisch style.

Everything about this movie is so crappy and pointless...You can't do otherwise than laugh about it. I hope to see other rubbish starring Hulkie, coz he's so incredibly funny. They should make a movie just with Hogan's face and a spin-off starring his mustache.

This is the movie that's out as "Shadow Warriors" on video (Blockbuster carries it as: "Shadow Warriors - 1997 - Hulk Hogan"). Apparently this is the second adventure with this group.

A former adversary who tried to kill Hogan and his men with biological warfare isn't dead, and has re-surfaced. Hogan goes out alone to fight him, and get injected with a deadly virus that gives him only 72 hours to live. The team goes into action to hunt the madman down, stop his evil plan, and save the Hulkster's life.

Not a bad movie, except with Hogan "dying", he isn't his usual kick-butt self. He still takes 'em down, just not as energetically. Tweed and Weathers help keep the action going, and Kove is a trip. It's not award winning material, just good old action fun. Enjoy.

To sum everything up: the inexplicably popular Hulk Hogan, washed-up can't-believe-it's-not-porno star Shannon Tweed, Apollo Creed, the cop from "Last House" (who was cool before I saw this) and some other guy who is cleaning up vomit at Wal-Mart while you read this shoot for hours and hours and hours from open spaces without getting a scratch. Usually writers try to make it remotely believable by having one guy shot in the arm or something like that but no, none of that for the indestructible Hulk Hogan. There's just something bothering me about Hulk Hogan being surrounded by twenty guys and just shooting them one by one with his painfully slow moves. It's a way-too-common trend in action flicks that villains with machine guns who are off-screen immediately stop existing. At least Seagal hides behind a crate or something. It's also pretty hilarious how none of the people who get shot appear to bleed, they just fall down. It looks like a bunch of kids playing cowboy and Indian. For people who think wrestling(which in Hogan's case, is not a lot more than soft punching) is real.

My friends and I just love to rent "bad" movies (good "bad" movies mind you) and watch them a'la MST3K. This is by far one of the best ones on Earth. If you rent this for anything other than a laugh you are a complete idiot. It has crappy plot, the action is just stupid (it's a chuck norris type of running in with a gun and killing a million people) and the acting...well let me just say "Hulk" and "good acting" should never be in the same sentence, nay the same PARAGRAPH.

If you have some quick witted friends and want to make fun of a movie you can not go wrong with this movie. I loved how it started out for pure BEATING (a word we used quite often to refer to mr. Hulk) value. They were on a mission to get a girl, Hulk beat some stuff, some guys shot at them, Shannon Tweed (we used the word "softcore" a lot when referring to her) got in a badly choreographed cat fight (note: I loved the scene where she was choking and she had no expression on her face...I'm sure they got her for her acting ability really).

This movie ranks up there with Ninja Vs. Mafia (although Ninja Vs. Mafia is still THE BEST.

The only point of interest in this film, for me at least, was the presence of Shannon Tweed. Aging like fine wine and kicking a$$ with grace, she proves once again that she had definite "action heroine" potential that could have taken her career in a totally different path, if she had chosen to go that way. Carl Weathers also emerges with his dignity intact. But what else is there for us to see? Hulk Hogan "haunted" by flashbacks of his traumatic past, in a role way beyond his reach? The heroes never getting shot in the gunfights despite the fact that they rarely bother to take cover? The all-American nut Martin Kove yelling "Yi-Ha!" while mowing down dozens of evil Arabs? Um, no thank you, I'll take Tweed. Too bad she's too old now to make another action movie. (**)