L'Ange de la vengeance

ANGEL OF VENGEANCE is another waste-of-time action movie from cult director Ted V. Mikels. It has a lot of incident and a lot of noise, but nothing much seems to happen in it, much like Mikels's fellow movie TEN VIOLENT WOMEN. Jannina Poynter plays a military-themed woman who is kidnapped by a manic survivalist group who go around killing motorbike riders in lots of extraneous and random scenes.

Poynter is raped and sentenced to death, but asks for a chance to prove herself by becoming the prey in a hunt, MOST DANGEROUS GAME-style. Inevitably the tables are turned and the bad guys soon wish they'd never encountered Poynter. The plot sounds interesting and it is, inherently, but as with pretty much all of the Mikels films I've watched, the awful execution lets this film down. It's a surprisingly tame and restrained piece in which all of the contentious material is kept off screen and there's not a single action scene to get excited about here. Instead it's something of a chore to sit through, and definitely what you'd call Z-grade.

This film begins with an attractive woman by the name of "Tina Davenport" (Jannina Poynter) traveling to a small town to conduct research on her deceased father. While there she encounters a sexual deviant named "Manny" (Macka Foley) who accosts her on several occasions before finally being arrested and taken to jail. Not long afterward, another man known simply as "Major Hargrove" (David O'Hara) pays off Manny's fine and together they head back to their small paramilitary retreat in the desert. On the way there, however, they run across some obnoxious bikers who take issue with Major Hargrove's refusal to concede the entire highway to them. So, to teach him a lesson, the bikers decide to pay a visit to the survivalist camp and settle the score. What they don't count on, however, is the fact that these survivalists are all fully armed and more than ready for combat. So much so that, within minutes, all of the bikers are killed--except for one particular female named "Linda" (Linda Eden) who is taken prisoner and given to Manny to do with as he pleases. However, because of his perverse impulses, it isn't until Manny kidnaps Tina and takes her back to the survivalist camp that things begin to change dramatically for everyone concerned. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this could have been a good movie, but it suffered from both poor writing and direction--to the extent that it was all rather predictable and boring. Throw in some weak acting and bad special effects, and the best I can rate this movie is about a 3 out of 10.

Angel of Vengeance (1987)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Tina Davenport (Jannina Poynter) arrives in a small town where she hopes to do some research on her hero father. Soon she runs into a crazy group of survivalists who rape her. They should have finished her off because soon Tina is coming back for vengeance.

ANGEL OF VENGEANCE is another low-budget action picture from cult director Ted V. Mikels. The director is certainly a cult item because he truly made some of the worst movies out there but I still find myself watching them simply because the man himself was so interesting. He really did seem like a great guy but sadly his movies really weren't all that good and that's certainly true for this film, which is pretty much a remake of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME.

On one hand I admire someone like Mikels who just goes out there and films movies. This one here actually has a lot more effort than most of his pictures and it seems the budget is a tad bit higher than normal but there are still all sorts of problems here. The biggest one is that none of the characters are all that interesting. The lead female might look good but do we really care about her character or what happens to her? I didn't. The villains are more like cartoon characters and not once do you feel threatened by them.

This leads to another problem in the fact that there's no tension in the film. There's no drama or suspense so add this to the fact that you don't care about the characters and it's hard to really hold any interest in the film. There are some decent explosions and the locations look great but there's just not much here to keep you entertained.

I like Ted V Mikels movies. Its not one of his better ones in my opinion but still good.

My review was written in May 1987 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.

"Angel of Vengeance" doesn't make much of its premise: gung ho survivalists killing folks in a remote mountain spot as practice for the war they believe is imminent. Pic is relentlessly dull.

Jannina Poynter toplines as a young woman researching a book about her late father, a military man, who has several run-ins with the survivalists led byu single-minded David O'Hara. About to be summarily executed as were the rest of the group's unlucky prisoners (including members of a local biker gang, called Thrill Killers), she talks O'Hara into letting her act as hitman prey for the troops, and then proceeds to skillfully kill off all of them.

Until Poynter goes on the rampage in the final reel, the picture unfolds listlessly with aloof camerawork, weak acting and mundane action scenes. A parallel subplot of a couple of thrill-seeking guys also on the rampage makes for filler leading to a predictable final twist.