“Drake. He used to be a good man, poor bastard.”

Drake’s rating: Not a high point for Drakes

Drake’s review: In the early 1970s, a young Timothy Bottoms was making some noise in Hollywood, appearing in such films as The Paper Chase and Peter Bogdonavich’s The Last Picture Show alongside other up-and-coming stars such as Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd. And that’s some quality work to build a career on, especially when you manage to go on to snag the role of the villain menacing amusement parks opposite George Segal in Rollercoaster* a few years later.

But that limelight doesn’t last forever, and there are times that an actor has to take a part just to keep working and make a buck or two. Which is probably all Bottoms made for taking on the lead role of Drake** in Total Force, a movie so bad that to even call it a bad movie is an insult to honest-to-goodness bad movies made by the likes of Coleman Francis and Uwe Boll. Total Force is less a movie than a collection of well-worn cliches stolen from better*** action flicks and stuffed into a 93 minute runtime that feels at least twice as long.

So what does Total Force give us in those 93 minutes? Well, badly choreographed gunfights for one thing. And badly choreographed fistfights. Also, trite dialogue, shoddy sets, amateurish direction, and wooden acting. And bad music. And, since it’s the ‘90s, cheap graphics that look like they were ripped from an N64 gaming console.

Which is fair, since the plot of this thing feels like a bad PC game of that era. Basically, Dr. Edmond Wellington (Richard Lynch, The Barbarians) has come up with something called a “Neurlator,” which fries the brain’s normal fight or flight response mode, turning it instead into fight or horribly slaughter. The project gets out into the wild and infects a lab tech, and it’s not long before Drake is leading Total Force, a special ops unit, in a mission to put the lid back on the project.

Which basically means killing the lab tech and all of his roommates, something that I must emphasize that Drakes are not really known for. Mostly we’re known for hiding in dark basements, feeding Mutant Mice, and pestering the Great Mutant Overlord with podcast ideas like “The films of Harrison Ford, but the Silent actor not the Indiana Jones guy” and “Everyone’s top three middle school educational shorts.”

But this Drake does his murderous best to clean up the mess left by the Neuro-thingy, leaving several bodies in his wake, and then gets fired by the shadowy government agency he works for. Of course, they have to hire him back 20 minutes or so later, as Wellington goes rogue after having the project taken away, and threatens to unleash the power of the Neuro-whatsis on downtown Los Angeles. I think. My cat was demanding lap time right about then, and I was having to type my notes with one hand while he curled up into the other arm, so what I wrote down is fairly unintelligible.

Then again, so is this movie.

But then David Carradine’s daughter Calista shows up and does some martial arts which are unimpressive but still somehow more convincing than her father’s “kung-fu,” which usually consisted of him barely moving and the stunt men throwing themselves through the air. She’s joined by Sylvester Stallone’s brother Frank, who is a bad guy as well, but also a friend of Drake’s and so they kind of reconcile at the end and I’m thinking they had a platonic male date night at Red Robin after the credits rolled.

Total Force was directed by Steven Kaman, a.k.a. Steven Nuvo, who was primarily a cinematographer for movies that will never be reviewed on this site since their primary draw is people getting naked and doing things that are much harder to do if fully clothed. But honestly, considering the camera sway on display here, if his other movies are anything like this one they probably inspired less in the way of lustful thoughts and more in the way of outright nausea. I mean, that video camera moves around like it’s being operated with one hand while the cameraman swings from a vine with the other and chugs 100-proof vodka from one of those beer hats.

Which might be the case, come to think of it.

If you want to watch a flick that looks like it was made for about two grand, featuring relatives of well-known actors and bad, confusing action, then go ahead and check out Rollergator instead. At least that one pretends that a rubber hand puppet can talk, which is about one-thousand percent more originality than Total Force ever comes close to mustering.

*Obligatory review plug.

**Yes, I’m reviewing it because I can make cheap shots based on the character’s name. I’m a Mutant Reviewer. I have no shame.

***Meaning, any other action flick. Because they’re all better than this one.

Intermission!

• “Industrial Films Presents…” When that’s the best name you can come up with for your fly-by-night production company, you really might want to consider a different career.
• There’s enough stock footage in the first five minutes to make Ed Wood blush.
• And it keeps going. The movie’s probably about 25% stock footage.
• Which is still more watchable than the other 75%.
• We have a voice over now? And he sounds super-serious.
• The car sitting there dinging away because the door’s open. Low-budget filmmaking, everyone!
• Drake gets yelled at a lot, which is par for the course for Drakes.
• The action scenes go into blurry slo-mo mode since they’d look ridiculous at normal speed. I mean, they look ridiculous anyway, but at least this way they can blame it on the blurry slo-mo.
• Punch. Punch punch punch punch punch. Punch punch. Punch.
• Drake’s a loose cannon. Drakes are just like that.
• Abandoned industrial parks, the site of SO MANY low-budget ‘90s action flicks.
• And we have strippers. You can tell Kaman’s in his element now.
• Was this edited on a PC running Windows 3.1 using first-gen Adobe Premiere by an unpaid intern who hadn’t slept in at least four days? All signs point to yes.
• Well, at least it’s over and my sanity is still intact, if hanging by a single thread. Now I can leave this behind and… wait, there’s a sequel? OH, COME ON!!!