Shotgun - Arma de Fogo

A drug deal is "going down", and within seconds, thugs are flying through the air in slow-motion, like stuntmen in a movie.

BOOM!

SHOTGUN has begun.

Someone is beating prostitutes to death. Someone wrapped in leather, prefiguring "The Gimp" from PULP FICTION. Officers Ian Jones and Max Billings (Stuart Chapman and Rif Hutton) are on the case, willing to hit every porn shop, adult theater, and back alley dive in town, to catch the fiend.

Jones is a towering, ponytailed sasquatch of a man, certainly the world's tallest cop. It's fun to watch him "blend" into a crowd, when he's three feet taller than anyone else! He's also driven by a "personal score to settle" with the killer. When it comes to bad guys, Jones is ever ready to "take out the trash". He's truly "a man on a mission".

Ian's got a bit of a temper that leads to trouble with his job. No problem. He just becomes a bounty hunter. When Billings is injured, an even more vengeful Jones teams up with a survivalist. Together, they construct a canon / machine gun / flamethrower-endowed death-mobile! Yep, it's finale time! This could be called: Death-truck vs. The fortress of insanity!

The schlock gods are raining down gold upon us! You'll laugh so hard, you'll need rib bandages! You'll never look at giant cops in the same way again, ever!...

This one has every tired cop flick cliche imagined -- the partner loved like a brother, the hooker sister who ends up killed by a mask-wearing trick, other street walkers who all look like expensive call-girls and do their stuff to "Gee, is this a porno?" background music, the police command that's always making life difficult for the put-upon, hard-drinking partners (one Black, one White; one married, one single; blah blah blah).

For me, the highpoints of these films are those scenes in the Police Chief's office. You know the drill: "I'm watching you, G_dammit! One more dead suspect and you'll be walking a beat in the worst part of town I can find. You're OFF this case, capisce?!" In this regard, "Shotgun" did not disappoint. It kept me happy, too, with the camera work, acting, transitions, plot tricks and, especially, that God-awful heavy metal guitar soundtrack. The only thing missing was one of those moments where the hero cop splashes his face with cold water and stares intensely at himself in the mirror before the cutaway to the next head-bashing scene. But for that, it would be a perfect 10 in that parallel movie universe one enters through the bottom of a bottle of booze.

Summary: -10 stars in this Universe. Watch it late at night with an equally drunk friend and enjoy.

Two cops…two different cops…one white, one black…one officious and one who doesn't play by the rules. Playing by the rules can get you killed.

You may have encountered the above scenario a few times before. Shotgun is without doubt a cliché-fest and I love it for it. It's central character is called Ian 'Shotgun' Jones and he is on the hunt for a sadistic misogynistic maniac in a gimp suit. Stuart Chapin plays the title character perfectly with zero irony and humour; this makes him all the funnier of course. This is the joy of Shotgun in general, in that everything is played deadly seriously while at the same time being quite magnificently ridiculous. Take the scenes near the end where Jones and his buddy more or less build a tank out of scrap metal – pure hokum but oh so much fun. This extends to the music too. The soundtrack consists of many guitar solos and a theme song about the title hero. It's pure 80's cheese. Add to this a shot of a man being thrown into a pile of cardboard boxes from three separate angles, a badge handing-in scene, an angry chief, an arrogant lawyer villain, lots of prostitutes, people dancing in suits, a man being set on fire and then run over by a car, etc etc…you get the general idea.

As you might have guessed already, Shotgun is essentially a Lethal Weapon rip-off. It follows the basic template quite closely but obviously with hugely lower production values. Oddly enough, this doesn't effect the enjoyment level of the film very much at all, as it's not especially expensive to make an action thriller if you do it without any star names. And I might actually prefer Stuart Chapin and Rif Hutton to Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. I mean did Gibson and Glover ever appear in a drunk scene quite like the one here? In this one, Chapin and Hutton meet for a few beers at the latter's house and all I can say is it looks like they have had their drinks spiked as their acting suggests that they are tripping on acid as opposed to being ripped on alcohol. This is one of the funniest attempts at drunk acting I have ever seen. Another classic moment to look out for is in the corridor of the police station where the film-makers have decided to try and make the small number of extras they hired seem like a much larger group of people – watch characters walk off screen only to return a few seconds later in the opposite direction wearing shades etc. Great stuff.

Shotgun is a terrifically entertaining bad movie. It has an agreeable smattering of action, sleaze and unintended hilarity. Definitely a hidden gem of a movie for bad movie buffs. A very entertaining flick overall.

For a time, I thought I was the only person in the world to see this sorry excuse for a movie, catching it during late-night TV. Sometimes this movie is so bad, it's hilarious. But mostly it is INCREDIBLY AWFUL. And I don't mean just everyday AWFUL - I'm talking about ****AWFUL****! The actor who plays the character who gets the creative nickname "Shotgun" is perhaps the WORST ACTOR IN THE WORLD! Really! I'm not kidding.

Maybe you should see this movie anyway, because anything you'll see afterwards will look even better!

P.S. - This production company (formerly City Lights, now PM Entertainment) did improve over time, and now PM generally makes decent and slick B movies that deliver the goods. The general rule, however, is to avoid ALL their movies made before 1993!

There are bad films and there are 'so-bad-they're-good' films. 'Shotgun' falls – weirdly – somewhere between the two. Part of me wants to say that it was truly the worst film I've ever seen. But then I am I charge of the remote control. I could have turned it off any time I wanted, yet I didn't – I stuck with it until the end. I guess that means I took some strange form of enjoyment out of it? I guess if I had to describe 'Shotgun' I'd call it a 'Lethal Weapon' clone, only filmed on the budget of £1.59. It's about two (mismatched) cops (one black, one white) on the trail of a brutal serial killer (as opposed to the kind and gentle serial killers, of course!).

Now, normally this is the point in the review where I say something like 'So… if you're a fan of 'buddy-cop' movies then you'll probably get something out of it.' I know it's not the most original premise, but it can't be THAT bad, can it? The answer to that question is 'Yes.' The problem with this film isn't its lack of originality, it's the budget. You could almost mistake this film as some sort of 'student' effort. Seriously, I made a few short films at college and some of them look more professionally-done than this! Almost every scene is a set. Yes, I know most Hollywood films are made on sound stages for ease of production. However, here, you can almost see the boom mic hanging down – it's that obvious. Then there are the actors. Or should I say 'actors?' They can't act. Again, I get the impression that if you grabbed the nearest guy at the pub and stuck him in front of a camera, he'd pull of a more convincing 'cop in crisis' performance that the lead actor (plus he'd probably look less like a hobo-Beegee). And don't get me started on the action. There's the odd squib full of blood that just about looks passable, but when it comes to anything involving cars they just film the 'chase' at normal speed then fast forward the footage, giving off some sort of 'Benny Hill' vibe to the scene.

Overall, it's really hard to recommend this film to anyone. I only continued to sit through it just to see how bad it actually got. By the time the credits rolled, the major emotion this film invoked in me was pity. I actually felt sorry for the cast and crew who made this mess. They must have known that the budget and talent wasn't really there in order to make something that would compete with the proper Hollywood blockbusters. They could have played this to their strengths and turned it into a parody (it worked for 'Loaded Weapon!'). Unfortunately, they seemed to act (and I use the word 'act' loosely) like the truly believed this was some sort of gritty epic action movie that would stand the test of time. Sadly, it's an awful movie. If you're looking for an action movie, there are better. If you're looking for a buddy-cop movie, there are better. If you're looking for a serial killer movie, there are better. The only reason you'd want to watch this is if you're a huge fan of bad movies and just want to say that you've watched what possibly could be one of the worst films ever made, just so you can win an argument in the pub at a later date.