Fugitive Rage

This is not a movie to take too seriously and anyone expecting anything like a serious crime drama would be advised to stay away. Here we have our heroine, played by Alexander Keith, jailed for shooting a scumbag gangster, beating up the jailhouse bullies, before being recruited by a government agent. With a price on her head by the stricken mobster the scene is set for her to wipe out the bad guys to say nothing of sorting out a couple of hillbilly types in a bar. The film is full of comic-strip violence of the kind where countless blows are struck to the head without leaving a mark. The shadowy agent has an eccentric minder played by a veteran actress, certainly one for the connoisseurs. It may be daft but apart from a clumsily executed and redundant sex scene, never dull.

Watchable paint-by-numbers action flick utilizing the female assassin shtick. Personally, I'm a fan of this sort of generic dumbassery, so I found it pretty enjoyable and scores extra points for it being made in 1996, a time when these sort of movies were starting to phase out into the unwatchable crap that passes for action nowadays. Nothing you haven't seen before but there is one scene that made me laugh out loud. After subduing one of the main bad guys, the leading lady tells her partner, "If he moves, shoot him!". She walks away and the guy starts trying to talk his way out of it and, instead of listening, the partner goes, "You moved!" and shoots him dead. Awesome! How many of these kinds of movies have you seen where you are saying "Just shoot the guy!" only for him to escape and cause more problems? Well, this movie finally showed some rare common sense and did what we all wanted! It's worth watching just for that!

This time around it's not a Badham, or a Besson that tackles the now-popular female assassin formula, but B-movie great Fred Olen Ray. Ray has given us some truly terrible movies (1994's `ATTACK OF THE 60 FOOT CENTERFOLD') and some okay movies (like this one, and `POSSESSED BY THE NIGHT'). All in all Ray shows what he can truly do here in this VERY stylish thriller. Basically, Tara McCormick (Wendy Schumacher, one of the best looking women in Hollywood, and a good actress on top of that) is arrested for an attempted murder, and is recruited by the government to become a hit woman. The acting, for the most part, is subtle, and not over-done, like most of these movies. The action is right on the mark, and there's plenty of it. Basically, it functions not only as a good `NIKITA' clone, but also as a successful B-movie that over-comes its budget and delivers quality.

**SPOILERS** Having murdered her sister decorated LAPD cop and SWAT team leader Alexander or should it be Alexandra Keith,Tera McCormick,is in the courtroom at the trial of her sisters murderer the "Gucci Don" Tommy Stompanato ,Jay Richardson. As Stompanato is found innocent of Keith's sisters murder she unloads a full load of lead on the startled mobster putting Keith behind bars and Stompanato in the hospital in critical condition.

Tommy is determined to have Keith done in for what she did to him but before he can get someone inside the prison to do it. Keith is put under the wing and protection of secret government agent James O'Keefe, Tim Abell, to go undercover and help bring down the Stompanato crime empire. It turns out that Tommy is involved in illegal arms dealing, a no-no, with a number of Middle-Eastern dictatorships that's interfering with the big political money contributors who's profits he's cutting into. Keith who made friends in prison with fellow woman jailbird and convicted murderer, Josie Williams, Shauna O'Brien, also get's O'Keefe to put her into protective custody to be released with a full pardon after Keith finishes her assignment.

The movie "Fugitive Rage" is a guilty pleasure to watch with Keith looking more like a Playboy Centerfold then a hard as nails crime fighter. Keith takes on the entire Stompanato Mob single handedly and at the same time is being manipulated ***MAJOR SPOILER***by her handler, and lover, O'Keefe to be killed! this after she successfully completes her mission. It's also later revealed that Tommy's second in command Frank Ryker,Ross Hagen, is in on the "fix". It was US secret service Captain Ryker who had his entire secret agent undercover unit sold out and killed by the Communist in Eastern Europe in 1989 when the Commies were still there and running the show.

the action scenes in the movie are laughable with Keith, or her stunt double, looking ridicules as she fight and shoots it out with the Stompanato mobster. Hundreds of bullets fired in Keiths direction, ,many at point blank range, completely missing their target. It's as if Keith has some invisible force field protecting her. There's also a car chase where Keith is run down and ends up on the hood, with the two mobsters not having enough sense to shoot her, and end up in a fiery car crash with Keith walking away without as much as a scratch on her.

These two same numb-skull hoodlums later try to kill Keith and O'Keefe as their sleeping in their motel room in, of all places,the infamous "Bates Motel" by driving their car through the wall! When just a few well placed bullets from a silencer would have done the job without attraction any attention, and ending up killing themselves.

It doesn't take long for Keith to get to the Stompanato Mansion and finish off the reminder of his mob and Tommy himself. It turns out that Keiths fellow secret agent O'Keefe and his boss the former Captain Ryker are who she has the most trouble dispatching;but As usual in the end, like during the entire move,luck and the movie screenplay turns out to be on Keiths side.

FUGITIVE RAGE is a disappointing little adventure with just enough of a budget to look professional but not enough talent in the right places. Its lead star, Alexander Keith (credited as Wendy Schumacher), once described themselves as hoping to become "the female Van Damme," but I'm sorry to say that this movie isn't even up to Van Damme's standards. It's an action movie with bad action, and a weak attempt at a feminist feature by people who definitely aren't feminists.

The story: Sent to prison for the attempted murder of a mobster (Jay Richardson), police officer Tara McCormick (Alexander) is offered her freedom by a shady government agent (Tim Abell) in exchange for renewing her assassination attempt.

The quality of the action is average, at best. There are a few shootouts, but they're so impersonal that you won't care about them. There's a goofy instance wherein Tara is hit by a car and hood-surfs until the vehicle inexplicably crashes, but this too is boring. This leaves us with the five fight scenes, but their quality isn't much better. While Keith is a legitimate martial artist, their fights are plagued by a variety of problems: if they're not poorly blocked or clumsily edited, they're painfully slow moving or just simply feature bad choreography. If you want to see Keith's moves utilized a little more gracefully, check out the Michael Dudikoff vehicle COUNTER MEASURES, but don't get your hopes up for this one.

Dramatically, all of the performers do a decent job, and there's even a little chemistry between Keith and Shauna O'Brien as her cellmate. The problem is that the boring screenplay demands so little of these performers that virtually anybody could have played the characters. Surprises are few and innovation is nonexistent, unless the clumsy attempts to turn this into a "girl power movie" can be called clever. Director Fred Olen Ray and producer Jim Wynorski have gone on record stating their condescending opinions on female representation in B-movies, and the things they've decided to highlight in the movie reflect these. There's gratuitous nudity and sex, violence against women, recurrent sexist (and racist) dialogue, lurid descriptions of violence, and a sadistic lesbian warden. Aside from the fact that none of this is counterbalanced by simply having a physically powerful woman as the star, such features give the film a mean-spirited edge that's really too much for it to withstand. Despite its pro-woman overtones, FUGITIVE RAGE disingenuously panders to the 18-36 male demographic and suffers for it.

Even if you're not particularly put off by what I just pointed out, I still can't recommend this one at all. Die-hard B-movie enthusiasts may find mild delight in its corniness, but even they will be likely to wonder whether it was worth digging out the old VCR for. Leave it be.