El Chupacabra

Dolph Lundgren seems to be making a small comeback in recent years with the release of several East European-based movies (excuse to launder money?). The Russian Specialist was actually written by the Universal Soldier himself so you can imagine our excitement. Dolph is an ex-Spetsnaz Special Forces soldier who now works as a mechanic (hence the title in Russia, The Mechanik).

It started off as a straight-forward Punisher type revenge story. His wife and child are both killed by a local crime boss during a drug deal. He gets revenge by killing the boss's foot soldiers and shooting the boss in the face. This all happened in the first thirty seconds of the movie so it was a little overwhelming. Dolph, thinking the crime boss is dead, movies to the U.S. and gets a job at Speedy Muffler. He is tracked down by a Russian woman that wants her kidnapped child returned to her. He refuses despite the $500,000 dollar reward. "Hey, look, Speedy Muffler pays pretty well and the manager brings in free crullers every morning". The catch is that the girl is being held by the crime boss that Dolph thought he had killed. He heads back to Russia to meet the team that will help him rescue the girl. We are treated to some nice cinematography of Russia (I think it's Russia). It's kind of like Canada with all its evergreens and such except we don't have a Canadian Dolph Lundgren. The closest thing we have would be Eugene Levy.

Dolph's idea of staking out the club where the girl is held is to break one bouncer's arms and shoot the other bouncer in the face. Very low key Dolph, your Special Forces training is shining through. To test the skills of his team he punches one of them in the head and sticks a gun in their face. Everyone ends up pointing a gun at Dolph which apparently signals their ability to work as a team. They have an inside woman who is forced to work as a prostitute at the club where the kidnapped girl is being forced into the same trade.

Original Plan: Using their inside contact, they'll get access to the clubs upstairs through a side entrance. They'll sneak in and find the room the kidnapped girl is in and sneak her out the same way. Meanwhile the other team members will disable the bouncers and sneak their guns into the club to cover the escape.

Analysis: Not a bad plan. They can sneak in with no resistance, pretend they are clientele, and sneak the girl out without a shot fired. I'm not sure why the other team members go into the club at all, maybe they should just wait in the truck.

Actual Result: They go in the side entrance as planned. Dolph finds a guy about the have sex with the drugged kidnapped girl. He kicks him in the testicles and takes the girl. Instead of going out the side entrance, he kicks a guy through a glass window right into the club below and comes down the main staircase. In the process, half his team is killed and all hell breaks loose.

Analysis: Dolph is an idiot. But it was entertaining to watch him be an idiot.

They make their get away and end up in a small town, but not before their get-away van breaks down twice so that Dolph can show off his mechanic skills. If he really was a good mechanic maybe he would have acquired a working get-away van and not taken an entire day to put a kids bike chain back on. The crime boss hires Nancy Drew (she'll work any case if the money's right) and immediately finds out which girl was the inside (wo)man as well as every move that Dolph and the remainder of his team make. He tracks them down to a village on the Russian-Finland border where both sides square off. Dolph uses a skeet shooting shotgun so play this game when you watch the movie: every time he shoots his shotgun, yell "PULL". Very fun.

In a violent climax that would have had all the villagers shitting their pants, Dolph gets final retribution by killing the crime boss once and for all. I won't tell you how, but let's just say that if a shot to the face didn't kill him, this killed him six or seven times.

This movie was actually quite enjoyable. It had some unintentionally funny moments and although there was no He-Man sword, we can overlook that for now.

El Chupacabra's Ratings
Entertainment: 72%	B-Movieness: 80%
Quality: 68%	Regret: 29%

Eberts Thumb

Dolph Lundgren shows that he's a triple threat: acting, writing, and directing. Althought its hard to say who he's a threat to since he was lacking in all three categories. And considering he helped write it, he could have written himself some better dialogue. Almost all of his lines were 3 words or less. Maybe the fake russian accent was too hard to keep up for a long time.

Dolph plays an ex-Spetznaz soldier who is pulled out of retirement for one last job to get revenge on the mobster who killed his family and rescue the girl in a mission that will get more people killed than saved. If this sounds familiar its because its all the cliches from every other action movie he's done.

To enjoy this movie, you'll need to gloss over a few obvious flaws in the story:

• His British soldier buddy has problems shooting people a few feet away who are shooting at Dolph.
• They explain the plan to get the girl out of the brothel, but completely scrap it when something goes wrong, and it gets half the team killed.
• The mobsters follow the team to the same sheep farm in the middle of the Russia. I'm not the best at geography, but I know that Russia is pretty big, and I can imagine that they have a few sheep farms in the countryside. Then the farmer points to which way the team went, and this leads them to the exact town the team stopped in (although it was the same town as the start of the movie, so its plausible).
• The doctor lets a guy die. "He's lost to much blood. Theres nothing we can do", and the next morning the guy dies. How about a blood transfusion doc? I know that Russian medicine isn't as advanced as Canada, but surely they have some needles and tubes.
  

If you can get over these, you are in for an OK time. It wasn't as good as Direct Action, but it was decent.

Charles Bronson

GUESS WHAT, HEMAN MADE A MOVIE! I THINK SKELETOR AND SKUNKOR HELPED. ALL OF THEM MUST OF JUST WATCHED THE PUNISHER AND SAID "HEY LET'S MAKE A MOVIE, ANY IDEAS? PAUSE ............ WHAT ABOUT COPY THE PUNISHER FOR THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF THE MOVIE. AWESOME! WE ROCK! SO DOLPHY WRITES IT AND IS THE LEAD CHARACTER, AND HE IS SMART ENOUGH TO PAY HIMSELF BY THE WORD IN THE MOVIE. KNOWING HE CAN'T ACT ALL HIS SENTENCES ARE LESS THEN FIVE WORDS. HE IS AN EX-RUSSIAN SPECIAL FORCES NOW MECHANIC, SHEIRA WOULD BE SO PROUD. HIS FAMILY DIES IN THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF THE MOVIE AND HE SEEKS REVENGE BY KILLING ALL OF WHOM TOOK PART IN HIS FAMILIES MURDER. HE SHOOTS THE MAIN BOSS POINT BLANK IN THE FACE OUT IN BLOODY NOWHERE, AND SOMEHOW THIS FATSO DOES NOT LOSE ENOUGH BLOOD TO DIE AND IS ABLE TO FIND A HOSPITAL (WHAT ARE THE ODDS). SO DOLPHY FINDS OUT SEVEN YEARS LATER THAT HE IS STILL ALIVE AND NEEDS TO RESCURE SOME CHICK THAT THE BOSS KIDNAPPED FOR RANSOM. DOLPHY'S RESCURE MISSION COULD HAVE WORKED LIKE A CHARM BUT WE MUST REMEMBER ONE THING. THIS IS A B-MOVIE AND DOLPHY IS A MORON. SO THEY FOUND THE CHICK EASILY IN SOME BAR/WHORE HOUSE AND ARE SUPPOSE TO SNEAK OUT THE BACK LIKE WHERE THEY GOT IN, BUT FOR SOME ODD REASON THEY DECIDED TO GO OUT THE FRONT WHERE EVERYBODY IS AND ALL HELL BRAKES LOOSE. MOST OF HIS RESCUE TEAM DIES THANKS TO HEMAN HAVING AN I-Q OF 14. DURING THE REST OF THE MOVIE THE BAD GUYS HAVE AMAZING PHYSIC POWERS BECAUSE THEY ALWAYS FOUND OUT WHO WAS HELPING THEM AND WHERE THEY WERE GOING WITHOUT ANY CLUES. OVERALL THIS IS A DEFINITE MUST SEE FOR A GREAT LAUGH. BEST PART FOR ME, CONSIDERING DOLPHY IS A MECHANIC IN THE MOVIE IT TOOK HIM ABOUT FIVE HOURS IN THE MOVIE TO FIX PUTTING THE CHAIN ON SOME KIDS BIKE BACK ON. I AM NO MECHANIC WHEN I WAS A KID, BUT IT ONLY TOOK ME ABOUT FIVE MINUTES. GOD BLESS DOLPHY.