Bad Movie Club: Terror in Beverly Hills

1989 action movie

Bad Movie Rating: 3/5 (Josh: 2/5; Fred: no rating)

Rating: 5/20

Plot: The president's daughter is kidnapped in Beverly Hills by Middle Eastern terrorists, and only Hack Stone can save her! Hack Stone!

Frank Stallone may be the "star" of this, but he really wasn't in it all that much. I guess this was a troubled production (not having film for the camera, etc.), and Stallone stopped showing up until they agreed to pay him every morning for his work. So he's missing from a large chunk of this movie. Not that it matters all that much because he's interchangeable with any C-level action star from the late-1980s. Any hack could have been Hack Stone.

That's right--his name was Hack Stone in this.

The real star of the movie--and somebody who could not have been replaced--is the great Cameron Mitchell as a surly police chief. You know this type of character from countless B-movies that you've seen. He finds any excuse to yell and curse, throws down phone receivers instead of hanging them up, and snarls a lot. A lot of his lines seems improvised to me, and he really stands out in a movie that desperately needed somebody to stand out.

Pacing was a problem in this one. It takes forever for this one to find a plot. We start with the terrorists on their home turf and then follow them to the airport and to America, seemingly in real time. They lackadaisically scheme and then finally carry out this kidnapping. The kidnapping and ensuing car chase depended on a whole lot of people being terrible at their jobs, and then they're shut up in some sort of defunct bean storage facility for the rest of the movie, one that is easy to find because they traveled via white limousine there. It seems like a no-win situation to me. Normally, I would root for the terrorists when the good guy is a Stallone, but I couldn't support this kind of buffoonery.

There are two great death scenes in this. One is the main bad guy--oh c'mon, did you really think the bad guys were surviving this movie with Hack Stone coming after them?--who makes a baffling decision after a really dull bit of fisticuffs and then is disposed of in what has to be considered overkill. The other is during this ten minutes of movie where the sound is all screwed up and only the dialogue can be heard. Now that might just be an Amazon issue. But a barking dog, the music, the gunshots. It was all very muffled while the dialogue could still be heard, probably unfortunately. Anyway, a character is shot, makes a barely-audible splash in some sort of fountain, and then is shot several times

Watch this for the great Cameron Mitchell performance and the gratuitous nudity.

Hey, wait a second. Cameron? Mitchell? That's the gay couple on Modern Family. Somebody must have been a fan.

Lots of Pepsi product placement. I hope they didn't pay for it.