Killing American Style (1988) (Blu-ray Review)
DIRECTED BY: Amir Shervan
STARRING: Harold Diamond, Jim Brown, Robert Z’Dar
RATED: UR/Region: O/1:78/1080P/NUMBER OF DISCS 1 (BDr)
AVAILABLE FROM Leomark Studios
Well, here’s a movie that apparently believes the best way to solve America’s problems is to hand a guy a gun, give him a heroic-sounding name like John Morgan, and let him start shooting until the end credits roll. Forget diplomacy, forget law enforcement, forget therapy. We’ve got a gang of hot-headed brutes led by Tony Stone running around on a killing spree, and apparently John Morgan is the only man in America qualified to deal with this situation. Somewhere, the Avengers are feeling pretty embarrassed about their employment status.
Directed by Amir Shervan, the cinematic mastermind behind Samurai Cop, Killing American Style is another glorious reminder that not every movie needs a coherent plot, believable dialogue, or actors who appear to have met their characters before filming began. Sometimes all you need is a bunch of angry dudes, an alarming number of guns, and enough testosterone to make an entire gym locker room spontaneously combust.
The plot is wonderfully straightforward: bad guys do bad things, people get shot, and John Morgan shows up to restore order through the time-honored American tradition of solving every problem with an unreasonable amount of ammunition. Tony Stone and his gang are apparently so committed to being terrible human beings that they make your average neighborhood HOA look like a humanitarian organization. These guys don’t need a criminal record; they need an exorcism.
And then there’s the unmistakable Amir Shervan factor. If you’ve seen Samurai Cop, you already know you’re not necessarily dealing with conventional filmmaking here. Shervan operates in a cinematic universe where logic is optional, subtlety has been declared illegal, and every line of dialogue sounds like it was delivered by someone who just found out the camera was rolling. It’s beautiful in its own deeply questionable way.
This is the sort of movie where you can practically feel the budget sweating. The action, the performances, and the overall presentation have that wonderfully scrappy 1980s direct-to-video energy. It’s like somebody watched a big Hollywood action movie, remembered approximately 40 percent of it, and decided they could recreate the rest over a weekend with some friends and a suspiciously large collection of firearms.
But that’s exactly why movies like this are so entertaining. There’s something incredibly charming about a production that swings for the fences while occasionally forgetting where the baseball field is. It’s gloriously cheesy, completely committed to its own nonsense, and about as subtle as a brick through a department-store window.
Final verdict: Killing American Style is a glorious slab of 1980s action ridiculousness. It has criminals, carnage, and a hero named John Morgan, which sounds less like a movie character and more like the name of a guy who sells insurance until somebody steals his lawn mower. Amir Shervan once again gives us a reminder that bad filmmaking can sometimes be more entertaining than good filmmaking. This movie doesn’t just kill American style. It shoots American style, reloads American style, and probably violates several OSHA regulations American style. God bless the ’80s.
