Zantara Xenophobe
*This review contains some plot SPOILERSSometimes, you just have to wonder why a movie gets made. In the 80's, there were a lot of cheap action movies that were hurriedly produced to cash in on the VHS craze when the new video rental outlets were starving for titles to put on their shelves. But when the 90's came around, the demand was waning. A cheap action movie with an even cheaper title (a very common trait…just slap some title on there that sounds tough) like Sudden Thunder doesn't seem like it should exist. And it REALLY should NOT exist. In a small hick town, the local sheriff is driving along the road one day when a gang of local thugs runs him off the road, slathers him in gasoline, and blow him to bits. His daughter Patricia (Andrea Lamatsch) is a Miami cop and immediately goes to the town to find out what happened. Everyone is tight-lipped to her questions. She reports this to her Miami cop buddies and tells them to stay put because she will handle this. Her cop buddies immediately ignore this command and head over to the small town to help out. Good thing, too, since, as soon as Patricia goes to the scene of the crime, she is jumped by the thugs who attempt to rape and murder her. She is left for dead but is rescued by old family friend Jake (Ernie Santana) who nurses her back to health and acts as eyes and ears in town, reporting back information to her when her friends show up and are instantly pegged as troublemakers by the local law. The Miami cops are framed for murder and end up hiding out with Patricia and Jake while they try to figure out how to clear their name. They realize they have to first learn why there are shady dealings going on, and soon discover that the mayor is in cahoots with a Miami drug lord. I imagine this woeful plot is enough to have caused most of you to quit reading and move on to something better to do with your time. For those still left, perhaps you're thinking, "This doesn't sound so bad." Well, you are wrong. Where to begin? For starters, you have ineptitude behind the camera. The pacing is unbelievably slow, with scene after scene just lurching along. Besides a few lame fight scenes and stand-offs, the "action" doesn't' take place until the movie has been on for an hour. And when you do finally get it, there is no flare whatsoever. The entire last half hour is one long, never-ending gunfight, not stopping until the very last second with what is possibly the most abrupt ending I have ever seen. You also have ineptitude in post-production. More than once, the largely inappropriate background music (listen to the melancholy music in the bar --- you won't believe your eardrums) is so loud that it drowns out anything the characters are saying. It's a totally unforgivable mistake. On the other hand, if the whole movie had been drowned in lousy music, it would have been a saving grace, because the dialogue is utterly hopeless. And, even if it wasn't, the ineptitude in front of the camera would demolish it. Every single character delivers his or her lines with excruciating pauses between sentences. And when one character talks after another, the pause is unbearable. Not that you want them to unpause, as the personality-less actors give no gusto to their line reading whatsoever. The new sheriff, who looks like the love child of John Carradine and Clint Eastwood, speaks through pursed lips. Lamatsch is about as vapid as they come. She speaks with a heavy French accent, something which demands an explanation as she was supposed to have grown up in the small hick town. This is an explanation that we are never given. She is very hard to understand but you can eventually figure out what she says because the dialogue is so routine that deducing her lines is a piece of cake. One might wonder why they cast her until you realize she is gives the best performance in the entire group. And considering how lousy she is, that is really saying something for the rest of the cast. I just now realized another thing the title could describe: an unexpected fart in an elevator from the person standing next to you. This seems an appropriate comparison to this film. Zantara's score: 1 out of 10.
