À balles réelles

My review was written in April 1990 after watching the movie on Vidmark video cassette.

Good intentions aren't enough in "Real Bullets", an amateurish saga of the life of stunt persons. Even a guest shot by Martin Landau can't save this one.

Filmmaker John Gazarian also toplines as a teacher of aspiring stunt artists who becomes an adversary to evil drug smugglers led by Wolfgang Linkman. His script with helmer Lance ("Star Crystal") Lindsay simplifies matters by using the real first names for the principal cast members.

Given the subject matter, stunts here are surprisingly unspectacular. Acting is poor. Leading lady is Darlene Landau, no relation to Oscar nominee Martin Landau who phones in his role as a mafioso.

1st watched 10/10/2002 - 2 out of 10(Dir-Lance Lindsay): Very bad stuntmen take on the drug-lords movie. The only reason I didn't give this movie a `1' is because it's so bad at times that it's funny and a good candidate for `Mystery Science Theatre 3000.' The plot is ridiculous, a group of good-ole-boys & girls stunt people run into trouble when they're just trying to get away for the weekend and then decide to take on the whole gang by themselves and become a bunch of individual `Rambo's.' Yes, even the girls. There is a bunch of repetitive dialogue that after awhile gets you laughing. The funniest bit came when they used one of the one-liners(You got a light. expressed as a way to get the bad guys attention but used once right before ousting one of them, this time intended for comedy) but most of them are just taken too seriously like the rest of this movie. They constantly are making comments like, `they sure got us now' only to begin wiping the enemy out one by one. This happens at least 3 or 4 times. Martin Landau is wasted and given about one continuos repetitive line(Not again, don't let them go alive!!) expanded a couple different ways. I guess what's good about this movie is that it's a wonderful example of how not to go about making a movie. The moral of this story is that if you're a stuntman stay one and don't try to make movies.

Let's face facts here. There's a world of difference between pulling off stunts in a movie and producing, writing, directing and acting in one, and this is proof of that. Very few stuntmen ever turned in good acting roles (Ben Johnson. Hal Needham, Jock Mahoney and Richard Farnsworth being a few exceptions to the rule), and some good stuntmen managed to make some watchable movies, but this one manages to rate at the bottom of the list. Even many of the stunts aren't very good. There's no story, no good dialog, no good directing, editing or acting. In short, this film was ill-conceived from the start, and proves that even action films can be a waste of time to sit through.

Following his debut Star Crystal (1986), writer-director Lance Lindsay quickly moved to Real Bullets but it seems to have slogged through post-production (evidenced by a odd voice over) and distribution (the date in the end credits is 1987, but Vidmark didn't put out the VHS until 1990). The So Calif Stunt Team led by John Gazarian (who co-wrote with Lindsay) heads to Vasquez Rocks for a fun weekend, but end up running running afoul of a major drug dealing operation (owned by Martin Landau, whose only scenes are him getting phone calls at home). Landau got roped into this as the female lead is his daughter, Darlene Landau. The end is basically a 20 minutes shootout with the stunt folks taking on 60+ drug stooges. Oddly, for a team of real stunt performers, the actual physical stunts aren't as over-the-top as you'd expect. Gazarian (a Glendale dentist in real life) must have been involved with Darlene Landau as they later re-teamed with Driven to Kill (1991), an early PM Entertainment release. As for Lindsay, he left the film business and now makes brass garden ornaments.

A middling low budget action thriller which involves a group of stunt actors and actresses tangling with a drug gang who kidnap a couple of their number, spurring a rescue attempt. Cheesy stuff indeed, with some RAMBO-style bow-and-arrow action. Totally implausible, but reasonably entertaining.