BY TODD GARBARINI
The
Annihilators is a
Spring 1985-lensed action film with lots of action and zero excitement. Coming
on the heels of Ted Kotcheff’s masterful 1982 Vietnam-themed film version of
David Morrell’s 1972 novel, First Blood, which itself spawned several
lifeless sequels including the latest and critically reviled Rambo: Last
Blood a mere 37 years after the superior original. (One cannot help but
think of the Rocky XXXVIII poster seen in 1982’s Airplane II: The
Sequel, and even that film was inferior to its own original). The
admittedly low-budget and bargain-basement Annihilators uses a familiar
theme to string together several long-winded and ultimately soporific action set
pieces that consist primarily of master shots with very little intercutting and
close-ups, but not before we get a credit sequence which sets the appearance of
onscreen names to the sound of machine gun fire. Clever! The 1980s were a time
of teen sex comedies, Freddy Krueger nightmares, and action films. The superior
examples of the latter, Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior (1981), Raiders of
the Lost Ark (1981), and Escape From New York (1981) all paved the
way for the less-than-stellar Invasion U.S.A. (1985) and The Delta
Force (1986).
The
Annihilators concerns
townsfolk and proprietors who find themselves at the mercy of gangs and
hoodlums, specifically The Scorpions, The Turks, and The Rollers. These gangs compete
with each other by coercing the store owners into paying them protection money.
If they’re late or light in the envelope, discipline is doled out with a knife
or a bat. A wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran, already done an injustice by
returning to a society that has no use for him following fighting in an
unwinnable and unpopular war, is killed when coming to another’s rescue. The
leader of The Rollers is Roy Boy Jagger (Paul Koslo) and I must say that I love
that name. It reminds me of Ernest T. Baxter from “The Andy Griffith Showâ€,
however Mr. Koslo infuses the former with exponentially more schoolyard bully menace
than Howard Morris ever did with the latter in the town of Mayberry. Jagger instigates
a rape and kills a female victim in an egregious scene that was initially
censored by international film boards and should have remained that way.
The
brotherhood that the vets have is a tight and lifelong bond because they have
seen things that the average American cannot fathom. We know this because the
film begins with an intro that takes place in the early 1970s that shamelessly
uses stock footage shot during the Vietnam War interspersed with obvious staged
scenes with actors. If you’re a member of the sleaze-film cognoscenti think
of Antonio Margheriti’s Cannibal Apocalypse (1980) and you know exactly
what I mean. Even the artificial explosions are unimpressive. The effort to
infuse this sequence with camaraderie is admirable though ultimately lacking
and is at times silly, especially when the rugged and late actor Christopher
Stone, in a follow-up role to his work in The Howling (1981) and Cujo
(1983), appears here as Bill, the assigned platoon leader who fires off rounds
of ammo while sporting a very obvious 1985 hairstyle. Flash forward to that
very year and it’s Bill who is called to town along with his confederates, two
of whom are Garrett Floyd (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) and Ray Track (Gerrit Graham),
to avenge their fallen brother following his funeral. They form factions and
teach the laypeople how to fight. At the center of all of this is Lieutenant Hawkins (Jim Antonio) who
has been brought in to keep the gangs in check. Naturally, it’s a losing
battle, especially since the gunfire that erupts in the streets between the
townsfolk and the thugs go on for minutes at a time with the cops riding in
miraculously at the last minute. The unspoken rule of the police department
seems to be to let these people fight it out in the streets and deal with it
all later and take the credit. The whole affair looks more like an extended episode
of The A-Team than a feature film. Even the truant kids look less like delinquents
and more like a group that was told to run around the corner and act bad while knocking
over some trash cans.
Produced
by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures and boasting an annoyingly minimalist
score by Bob Summers of One Dark Night (1983) fame (that film had a much
better musical composition), the film was shot on the outskirts of Atlanta, GA
as well as in Los Angeles, CA. Charles E. Sellier, Jr., a writer, producer and
director whose impressive career spanned more than four decades and was one of
the most revered and successful producers in the industry for many years, directed
the film following Snowballing and the execrable Silent Night, Deadly
Night both from 1984. His direction is flat and uninspired. Fifty minutes into
the film a character yells, “Come on, this is getting tiresome!†He could very
well have been watching the dailies!
Released
for a week in November 1985 in Los Angeles and later in New York, The
Annihilators actually made its way to silver screen status. Like most other
fare of its era, the movie poster art was no doubt generated upon a treatment
as it advertises a film that doesn’t exist here. The Blu-ray release of the
film is from Kino Lorber and the transfer, while decent, isn’t reference
quality. There is a twelve-minute interview with actor Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs
who is very engaging. In Search of Charles E. Sellier, Jr. runs ten
minutes and truly deserves to be a part of a much longer documentary just on
him. There is also a 1-minute comparison of gore, and the following trailers: The
Annihilators (1985), Steele Justice (1987), Wanted: Dead or Alive
(1986), Code of Silence (1985), Black Moon Rising (1986), and Stryker
(1983).
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