(re)search my Trash

<body> <div align="left"> <table border="0" cellspacing="0" width="800" cellpadding="0" height="100%"> <tr> <td width="100" rowspan="3" background="../stylepix/square.gif" valign="top">  </td> <td width="4" rowspan="3"></td> <td width="592" height="1%" valign="top">  </td> <td width="4" rowspan="3"></td> <td width="100" rowspan="3" background="../stylepix/squareright.gif" valign="top">  </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="592" valign="top" height="99%">    <p>A couple of crooks (Dick Miller, Laurene Landon) have stolen a very valuable statue from Yakuza boss Tanaka (Mako), and now he has hired shady private eyes Cory (Ross Hagen) and Clay (David Goss) to exchange the statue for a million Dollars in cash - but the whole thing ends in a shoot-out since Cory has set his eyes on keeping both the statue and the money for himself, but somehow Clay, whom Cory shoots personally, gets his hands on the statue and gets it back to his family before Cory can do anything about it - but clay figures now he can take off with the money scot-free and make Clay his scapegoat.</p> <p>Clay can just make it back to his brothers Jim (David Carradine) and Robert (Brent Huff) and his father Burt (Lee Van Cleef) before he breaks down and dies, but his relatives consider themselves particularly tough (the brothers were both in 'Nam, the dad was a cop), so they don't hand the case (or the statue) over to the cops and instead try to right the wrongs that have been done themselves ... and as a result, Robert is soon enough captured by Tanaka's men and tortured and killed because he doesn't want o give them the wehreabouts of the statue.</p> <p>Then Tanaka abducts Jim's wife and daughter (Lois Hamilton, Dah've Seigler), whom he now keeps in exchange for the statue and the money (which he doesn't know that our heroes don't have), and only by playing tough can Jim get him to change the deal, but Tanaka still tries to set up a trap for him and Jim walks into the trap intentionally ... and of course it all ends in a big shoot-out, during which Tanaka is blown away by an explosive hidden in the statue, and his second in command (Michael Berryman) wrecks Jim's bar by driving his car right into it but is ultimately shot by Jim's wife.</p> <p>And Cory and the money you might ask ... in an ironic twist of events, they have made it to the bottom of the lake after the female crook of the money handover at the beginning of the film (Laurene Landon) had tracked Cory down and had his revenge on him.</p> <p>Michelle Bauer has a cameo appearance as a stripper in this one, but she doesn't do much more than showing her tits ... well, actually she doesn't do any more than this.</p> <p> </p> <p>Cheap action flick, there is actually little more to say about it. The whole thing is full of clichés (like Japanese cutting off their fingers, an Asian handing out fortune cookies, a tough-as-nails ex-cop dad, a Vietnam veteran with flashbacks, ...) and features a very thin storyline as a hanger for its action scenes. The action itself is competently enough staged (for its budget at least) but lacks conviction or imagination. But, to end this film on a positive note, Dick Miller and Laurene Landon make a great couple as small-fry crooks trying to hit it big time.</p> <p>  </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="592" valign="top" height="1%">  <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> currentyear = "2007"; </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT language="JavaScript" src="../scripts/endcredits.js"></SCRIPT> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> dosworsdonn(); </SCRIPT> </td> </tr> </table> </div> </body>