The Shooter

Action, horror, sci-fi, exploitation director Fred Olen Ray shows he has some talent as a director. Character actor William Smith is one of the best tough/bad guys in the industry. He treats the viewer with the best acting performance of his career. As for Randy Travis he gives his best Lee Van Cleef impression. He's not bad in the film. Smith and Travis make the movie. As for the rest of the cast none of them really stand out. Ray did a great job directing this flick, Smith and Travis were good, I'd give this B western on a scale of one to ten(ten being the best) a seven.

I'm surprised about the many female voters who even give this film better marks. My thought about this film was that the target audience is adult and male. Whipped and tortured women, merciless revenge and a high body count are typical ingredients, introduced into film history by the spaghetti subgenre. The opening and the hand-smashing are DJANGO rip-offs. THE SHOOTER however lacks the style of e.g. DJANGO. Score, acting and cinematography are mediocre at best but if you look for the above mentioned ingredients you are in the right place here. And the actors don't have an Italian accent.

4 / 10.

Dudikoff stars as Michael Atherton a gunfighter and ex-union soldier, after stumbling across a woman being beaten by some no-good scum, Atherton naturally steps in and saves the girl(Valarie Wildman) and in the process finds himself targeted for vengeance by the family of one of the guys he killed and it's not long before Atherton is caught, beaten and almost killed, only to be saved by Wendy the girl he saved before, Atherton takes aim at taking down the family and does, however the sheriff has a vendetta, one that goes all the way back to the war in this far-better-than-you-would-expect direct to video western which features a decent story and Dudikoff in good form. This, The Silencer, Soldier Boyz and Virtual Assassin are the only watcahble movies from Dudikoff in the 90's. However where as Dudikoff is well suited to the role of a western, it's Randy Travis who ends up making the most impression and in turn steals the movie.

3/5 Matt Bronson

When I stumbled upon the 1997 Western "The Shooter" here in 2024, I had never heard about it. And seeing that it was directed by Fred Olen Ray, I have to admit that I wasn't really harboring much of any grand expectations to the movie. But with it being a movie that I hadn't already seen, of course I opted to give the movie a fair chance.

Writer Tony Giglio put together a rather enjoyable script and storyline. It was pretty straightforward, sure, but I liked it.

The only familiar faces on the screen were leading actor Michael Dudikoff, and also Kane Hodder and Nils Allen Stewart. I have to say that Michael Dudikoff carried the movie quite nicely, and it was nice to see him in a movie such as this; one that wasn't the archetypical action movies he starred in earlier. I was surprised to see the likes of Kane Hodder and Nils Allen Stewart in the movie, despite it being in small roles only. But their presence was most welcomed, nonetheless. The acting performances in the movie were good.

If you enjoy Western movies, then I will say that this movie is actually worth watching. I was genuinely entertained throughout the course of the movie.

I will actually go as far as to saying that this is by far the best movie from director Fred Olen Ray that I've seen.

My rating of "The Shooter" lands on a six out of ten stars.

"The Shooter" was a different type of film for Michael Dudikoff. Although normally associated with action flicks that incorporate martial arts, this film , because it was a western, enabled him to display that he is a far more capable actor than certain formula story lines have allowed.

The major problem, of course, is that the film does not allow any solid character development. The fleshing in is really left to the viewer . We can only guess at the sadness that has made the Shooter, whose real name is Michael Atherton, the killer that he is- a killer, mind you, that a little town, terrorized by a local bully, welcomes as a hero who can release it from its misery.