Nightforce

My review was written in May 1987 after watching the film on Lightning video cassette.

"Nightforce" a/k/a "Night fighters" during lensing, is a desultory action picture covering the corny territory of youngsters going south of the border on a mission to save their friend. Plot line was handled better in previous films "Toy Soldiers" and "Let's Get Harry".

Linda Blair is cast once again as a tough young babe, who insists on going on a commando raid with her male buddies when her best pal Christy (Claudia Udy) is kidnapped by terrorists. Her father, a U. S. senator (Cameron Mitchell), has opposed any negotiation with terrorists in his legislation and similarly the government's "hands are tied". Led by Christy's boyfriend Steve (James Van Patten), the youngsters head for Central America.

They're getting nowhere fast when a good samaritan Vietnam vet Richard Lynch protects them against Mexican baddies and volunteers to help out. Pic sags miserably during an uneventful middle section, followed by a corny climax (Christy has become militant and picks up a gun to shoot one of her tormentors).

Okay stunt work and Udy's randomly inserted nude scenes are the main diversions here, while Blair capably sings a theme song over the opening and closing credits.

I once took a job at a crappy, buffet-style restaurant to pay bills and I quit in less than a month. I hope that's the only reason Linda Blair decided to do this movie. I'm on a quest to see everything she's been in, and I love Linda Blair but jeeeeeez. BAD movie!

In a nutshell, a wimpy damsel in distress, daughter of a senator, is kidnapped by clichéd Latino terrorists and hauled off to some banana republic as a hostage. Now her father, a senator who pushes for no negotiations with terrorists, decides he'd rather loose his kid than his job and we are made to believe that the United States government is absolutely NOT going to recuse a senator's daughter. (Come on, that little country would have been turned into a parking lot)

Enter her 5 college friends. They are old enough to be legal to purchase guns, but still young enough to be stupid. Somehow, in a matter of hours, they procure machine guns and a bazooka and set off to shooting in the local dump without alerting the authorities. They then pile all the weaponry into the back of their jeep, cover it with a tarp, miraculously avoid the border patrol and just mosey down into South America looking for their friend.

Naturally they get into trouble. Enter Bishop, the Vietnam vet mercenary who, out of the goodness of his heart, equips the kids with better, bigger guns he happens to have lying buried in his backyard, training and cameo gear. How nice. And thank god he knew how to fly a chopper else they may have had to walk home at the end.

So now, the newly expert commandos, having bypassed the years of training necessary to fight the terrorists, rush in to rescue their friend and end up blowing up everything in sight. It's a good thing these terrorists who probably were given guns for Christmas toys as kids have no aim. In the process, 2 of the guys are killed, but hey, as long as they rescued the idiotic girl, then it's OK. Trade one certain death for 2 accidentals, it's all good. And despite the fact that all the bad guys are dead, they don't go back to retrieve their friends' bodies. I'm sure their families will understand. And how many times did this blond chick have to show her breasts or be raped? I think she wears clothes for all of 3 minutes of her screen time.

Now I WILL say this, Linda Blair did pretty damn good with what she was given. She was no wimpy, clichéd girl usually seen in these testosterone laced flicks. She had the best lines, watching the boys shoot off bazookas in the dump, tricking them into taking her along, and it was kinda cool to see her run, all decked out in cameo, shooting up some bad guy butt. However, for all her character's enthusiasm in rescuing her friend, she only got to shoot in the last sequence. The majority of the movie had her ducking behind cars as the boys shot the bad guys.

So why did I shell out $5 to a used video website and another $5 for shipping? As I said, I'm on a quest to see every movie Linda Blair's ever been in, even this one.

There *IS* one good thing that might make this video worth it to Linda Blair fans....the opening and ending credits has a rather catchy rock and roll song playing, and it is sung by none other than Linda Blair! She sounds a bit like Pat Benatar, not too bad either! She should have looked into a singing career instead of making this movie.

Hats off to Linda, major BOOOS to whoever wrote this swiss cheese of a plot story.

Extremely slight actioner features clean-cut, country club kids who become suburban Rambos after one of their friends--a busty blonde, no less!--is kidnapped by nefarious Mexican terrorists (naturally, these brutal nasties keep their caged hostage half-nude, but it isn't sexy because she's crying all the time). Straight-to-tape low-budget trash served as veteran actor Cameron Mitchell's swan song. Linda Blair, cashing a paycheck, seems placed amongst the cast only to get her name on the video-box (she has absolutely nothing to do). Why not make Blair the focal point and do a distaff variation on "First Blood"? Apparently nobody involved with this rinky-dink thing was really thinking--not director Lawrence D. Foldes nor his three-count 'em-three-screenwriters, Russel W. Colgin, Michael Engel, and Don O'Melveny. These guys are not hidden talents, they are hacks. NO STARS from ****

A definitive example of 80s action trash: probably the only people who would shell out cash for a ticket were wasted teens looking for some skin and lots of explosions. Watch the opening sequence and marvel out how shoddy the editing is: when one of the baddies fires at an officer, there is actually what looks like a break in the film (as if to chop a few frames out) followed by a painfully out-of-sync death scene of the fat officer- ooph!- getting plugged by a bullet, which apparently stopped in mid-air for five seconds while the camera crew switched reels.

By today's standards (and 80s standards, probably) the action is sub-par, not gory enough to be interesting but violent enough to be morally inexcusable. Thankfully, every once in awhile Night Force falls into softcore porn territory- this is the only movie I've seen that interrupts a cheap shower scene with flashbacks to a cheap sex scene- but not nearly enough to make the rest of the movie bearable. Night Force exploits pointless violence and gratuitous sex, and poorly. Virtually everyone involved in making this film- actors, actresses, FX technicians, editors- have officially lost any artistic integrity they once had.

Making a film that's even stupider than Schwarzenegger's "Commando" seems like an unimaginable feat, but here it is. Starts off with some gratuitous nudity, then degenerates into a ludicrous action film. Some of the dumbness was probably intentional, but that doesn't make it excusable. Linda Blair is curiously absent during most of the big action scenes, Cameron Mitchell, in his last film appearance, has a brief cameo, and the main villain is a Fidel Castro lookalike! The film is thankfully short, though (not counting the closing song, it runs about 73 minutes). (*1/2)