“How would you like to bite that in the butt, develop lockjaw, and be dragged to death?”

Can't really believe I've gone this long with this project without doing a Chuck Norris movie. THIS CHANGES NOW, with 1983's Lone Wolf McQuade, perhaps the most Chuck Norris of Chuck Norris movies.

Story

J.J. McQuade (Chuck Norris) is a damn good Texas Ranger, but also an antisocial loner and a slob. Oh, and he has a pet wolf. He plays by his own rules, and doesn't appreciate when his chief saddles him with an enthusiastic local cop, Kayo Ramos (Robert Beltran, who was Chakotay on Star Trek Voyager) whom he rescued on his most recent solo operation. McQuade, his recently retired mentor Dakota (L.Q. Jones), Ramos and later an FBI agent named Jackson (Leon Isaac Kennedy) proceed to get swept up into a scheme to stop martial artist gun smuggler Rawley Wilkes (David Carradine) from running weapons stolen from the US military to Mexican cartels.

What follows is a strange set of events where McQuade beats up thugs, falls in love with Lola Richardson (Bond Girl Barbara Carrera), the widow of Rawley's old partner, meets another of Rawley's old partners, Falcon, a little person in a motorized wheel chair who owns a horse track and an office with supervillain touches, and eventually pisses Rawley off so much that the villain tries to kill and/or kidnap most of the people McQuade cares about (and does a pretty good job of it). This culminates in a shootout in Mexico where McQuade and his surviving allies hunt down Rawley to rescue McQuade's teenage daughter Sally (Dana Kimmell). Naturally it comes down to a brawl between McQuade and his headband vs Rawley in a white argyle sweater.

Visuals

Director Steve Carver takes every opportunity to frame and shoot McQuade as heroically as possible. The rest of the movie consists of showing the rugged country side of the area around El Paso, Texas, and dudes getting beat up and shot by Chuck Norris. Some of them wear cowboy hats. Action scenes are generally entertaining in that Golan-Globus “we don't have squibs or fake blood” sort of way. The last fight between Norris and Carradine (and it IS Norris and Carradine, they insisted on not using stunt men for it) is actually pretty decent too.

Oh yeah, and this happens too:

Writing

Screenplay by B.J. Nelson, Story by H. Kaye Dyal & B.J. Nelson. Well, it's an 80s action movie script, so a lot of the characters are flat out archetypes and there aren't many surprises there. Yet still the movie manages to surprise by having said characters do unexpected things that make perfect sense given their personalities. McQuade driving his truck out of a makeshift grave is not something you see every day, and it does fit the character. McQuade himself is a stone-faced callback to Clint Eastwood's nameless gunslinger, but the side characters have a lot of personality, like Dakota, who drawls out all sorts of odd sayings.

Sound

Not much to say about the original score by Francesco De Masi other than it goes bombastic frequently enough but also nods back to Morricone's spaghetti western soundtracks.

Conclusion

Lone Wolf McQuade is very much an 80s action movie. It moves briskly, gives you familiar character types, gives you lots of action sequences, bickering heroes, one-liners, and still manages to work in some surprises every now and then. It's a solid B movie.

“If I'm not back in five minutes, call the Pope.”

And so I'm back from outer space, and you can tell by that sad look upon my face that you should've changed that stupid lock and thrown away the—No. Wait. That's not right. Where was I?

Oh yes. Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. It's like a 1980s Troma movie, but shot on 1970s film stock, except shot in the late 1990s in Ottawa, Ontario, and starring a few women who look like Suicide Girls.

This movie is WEIRD and DUMB. But is it the good kind of Weird and Dumb?

Story

Stop me if you've heard this before, but a bunch of vampires, led by Maxine Schreck (Murielle Varhelyi), Johnny Golgotha (Ian Driscoll) and Dr. Praetorious (Josh Grace), are killing and harvesting Canadian lesbians, so that they can wear their skin to gain immunity to sunlight. The only thing standing in their way? Savior of mankind and martial arts master Jesus of Nazareth (Phil Caracas) joined by his allies Mary Magnum (Maria Moulton) and silver-masked Mexican wrestler Santos Enmascardo de Plata (Jeff Moffet, and a nod to the actual El Santo luchador/movie star/vampire fighter)

Visuals

This was director Lee Demarbre's first feature length film, and it is extremely aware of its own amateurishness. I don't just mean the film quality. That's actually in its favor, since it really does remind me of 70s and 80s B-movies where the night scenes are poorly lit and the editing isn't quite as tight as it should be. The self-awareness expresses itself in the fight scenes, which are obviously not done by professional stunt people, but make up for it in goofiness. Jesus fights some vampires on the beach. Jesus fights a clown car's worth of Atheists in a public park who just showed up to pick a fight with him for no reason. Jesus & Santos kill a bar full of vampires with drumsticks, crutches, toothpicks and other improvised stakes. Dr. Praetorious (another nod to old cinema) fights Jesus by improvising organs as weapons.

Negatively, the pacing of the movie is rather awful. It's only 85 minutes long but so many scenes drag on much longer than necessary, particularly the “Jesus shops at a thrift store for hip new clothes” scene that wears out the gag really, really fast. The fight in the park with the atheists I mentioned? Completely irrelevant to the plot. The “Jesus Signal” scene transition? That gets old too.

Writing

Like the directing, there's a lot of hit and miss in Ian Driscoll's script. Some of the elements are great, and really show a deep love for genre films of the past. The whole presence of Santos is really funny, and not just because “haha, here's a luchador.” Johnny Golgotha is an AMAZING name for a douchebag vampire and I am insanely jealous. The crazy narrator-preacher that pops up randomly to rant at the viewer through his awe inspiring beard? That's pretty great too (and the best acting in the movie, at least... I hope it was acting). Unfortunately, there's lots more jokes that fall flat, like the running gag of someone grabbing the butt of Santos' appropriately named Gloria Oddbottom.

Sound

Everything is dubbed. Everything. A lot doesn't quite synch up with the lip movements, which can be funny. The occasional *bonk* sound effect in combat isn't very funny. The songs? Also not great.

Conclusion

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter tries to walk a fine line between telling its own absurd grindhouse-esque tale with a straight face but then constantly winks at the camera that it knows its awful. It's shameless enthusiasm is commendable, and speaking from experience, it is damn challenging to make an intentionally cheesy film, so tremendous props for achieving that. Yet as a comedy, it ultimately falls flat for its dearth of good jokes. The concept is good fodder for absurdist humor, but it doesn't quite deliver in a way that, say, Tongan Ninja does, a contemporary movie that it shares a LOT of similarities with. Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter feels like it makes a much funnier trailer than feature.