Media Monday: Rambo V - Last Blood

There's no good way to approach a review of this without sinking neck-deep into the current socio-political quagmire. There just isn't. I'm going to do my best to talk about it without engaging this, but I will fail. I'm just putting it out there that this review isn't meant to be a discussion of racism and politics in film, but rather, how to handle such issues in a way that doesn't make you look like a pack of morons.

Rambo: Last Blood is a garbage movie. There, I said it. Bring on the hate. I grew up watching the Rambo movies on VHS and (edited) television channels, so if someone wants to accuse me of not loving mindless action movies, come at me, bro. I saw Rambo 4 in the theater and left absolutely thrumming with adrenaline because I thought it was, if not a masterpiece, certainly leagues better than Rambo 3, and felt like they at least put some effort into addressing the complexities of the issues at hand with how outsiders view violent civil conflicts, and the futility of "helping" in regions where such help is marginal at best, and bloodily counter-productive at worst.

Last Blood, on the other hand, appears to have been conceived for the sole purpose of getting to the last 20 minutes of the film, and no one gave any real thought or care as to how the film got there. In order to talk about this, I'm going to have to deal with some extensive plot spoilers, so now is your chance to bail now if you don't want this.

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The long and the short of it is that Rambo is now living on a horse ranch in Arizona with Maria, a woman who is at least approximate to his age, and Gabriela, a young girl who is graduating from high school and going off to college. The first big problem here is that Rambo's relationship to these two women is never actually explained. At the end of Rambo 4, you see Rambo going to a place that you assume is his family farm, but in this movie, you don't really know who is related to whom. Rambo isn't Gabriela's father, or even her grandfather. There's mention of her mother, and a deadbeat dad, whom Rambo stopped apparently at one point from beating up the mother. I'm not even sure of the relationship between Maria and the younger girl - I think she might be an aunt, but I can't say for sure. Seeing as the film spends at least its first 20-25 minutes establishing the family dynamic, the fact that I couldn't figure out the relationships makes this just sloppy writing. This is especially annoying, because the entire reason Rambo goes so batshit later on is that the girl is so emotionally important to him, the "one good thing in his life".

OK, according to Wikipedia, Rambo has no relationship to any of these people. The horse ranch belonged to his dead father, and Maria is the grandmother to Gabriela, and Maria just...runs the household? That at least makes sense, but this relationship isn't really ever laid out clearly, which shouldn't be that hard. You at least know that Gabriela's mother died of cancer when she was little, and after that, her father - who was apparently always an asshole - leaves her with Maria and goes off to Mexico. Fast forward to now, when Maria is 18. A childhood friend of hers - Gizelle, who is referred to as a "bad girl" by Maria - is now living in Mexico, and she has found Gabriela's father, who apparently lives in the same Mexican town. Despite Rambo and Maria repeatedly telling her that her dad Miguel was a violent asshole and she shouldn't have anything to do with him, and Rambo even telling her that she should maybe let her urge to visit her father simmer a little before she makes the decision to visit him, Gabriela almost immediately ducks out and drives down to Mexico to go find Gizelle and her father.

I've already spent two long paragraphs here, so I'll keep this short. Dad is an asshole (surprise) and tells Gabriela to beat it. Gabriela is sad, Gizelle takes her to a club, where she sells (!!!!!!) Gabriela to some sex traffickers, who then drug and kidnap Gabriela. Gizelle then calls back to Maria, tells her she lost Gabriela, and Rambo goes full batshit mode and drives down to Mexico, where he finds Gizelle, realizes she sold out Gabriela, and gets her to point out one of the bad guys. Stuff happens, Rambo fails, and gets beat up by the rest of the bad guys, who decide not to kill Rambo, a guy who just tortured one of their own, and showed up with a pistol and a knife.

Gabriela gets doped up, gets her face slashed, and is put to work as a forced prostitute. Eventually Rambo learns from an "independent journalist" (who just happens to watch him torture one of the bad guys and saves him after his beating) where to find Gabriela, but alas, after he saves her, she dies in his car as they're just...I don't know, driving around in the dark. Yes it makes no sense. He finally drives over the border and brings her body home, then buries her on the farm. Maria just packs up and leaves. Rambo tells her he's going to leave too, but that's a lie. He goes back to Mexico and kills one of the two lead bad guys in a way so that they know it was him. He then comes back home, preps his murder maze, and in the last 20 minutes of the film, kills everyone. The end.

You might be thinking, "Hey, this actually sounds awesome, what's the problem?" but honestly, everything is just so stupid. It's not that the characters make stupid decisions - although there is some of that - but that every time the story reaches a point where something could be done in an interesting, intelligent, nuanced fashion, the car screeches off the road and goes into the ditch. By the time you get to the climactic battle at the end, it is boorishly obvious that the entire reason the film was made was to show Rambo running around an underground death maze, murdering bad guys with knives, punji sticks, old-timey guns, booby traps, and other assorted ordnance (claymore mines and hand grenades???). There isn't even any strategy or cleverness to any of it - bad guys just die, over and over, running flat-out into death and screaming in blood and pain.

I'm sure many of you are STILL shaking your heads and saying, hey, what's the problem? The problem is, it is stupid, sloppy work. This movie could have been a really good reflection on the plight of old soldiers who never really left the war behind. On PTSD and re-integration, on wanting to be left alone, only to find violence at one's doorstep again. And while you might think there's some of this, the movie only ever skims the surface, like a stone skipping across the water, but never sinking, just bouncing back out on the other side of the river. What was the point of the movie? What themes does it dig into? What message does it send? You could get the same thrill just firing up your XBox and killing dudes in some FPS game for a couple of hours.

And yes, I am skirting the whole "Mexico" issue. The only thing I'll say about that is, you could have told the exact same kind of story, even with most of the major plot elements relatively intact - and not use Mexico as this sort of Hades-esque underworld that you only venture into at your own risk. It is, again, sloppy, tone-deaf plotting that so obviously doesn't care how it is going to be received, and in fact is probably counting on "snowflakes" hating the movie to stir up buzz and get defensive butts in seats in support of the movie. I don't know, and that's not something I want to engage with, but again - there were many directions the movie-makers could have taken this story and at the same time, left its bones intact. They picked a route through some really, really questionable waters, and at the same time, made a film so sloppy and superficial that there's no real substance to back up the choices they made, except to get us to the finale with extreme prejudice.

Honestly, I am really disappointed.

Wargaming Wednesday: Not Just Dungeons and Dragons

Dungeons and Dragons was the first pen-and-paper tabletop role-playing game I ever encountered. I started playing in the summer of '93, when two of my friends had the "Big Black Box" edition of the DnD Basic Rules set. For those of you who know what the BBB version is...well I don't need to tell you anything. For all you newbies out there, this was a really big intro boxed set that had a ton of "rules cards", a big map adventure, tiny cardboard monsters and PCs...basically everything you'd need to play the first few levels of your characters - which is not unusual for the D&D boxed sets - but in a larger format, with full-color maps and cardboard counters.

Up until this point, I really hadn't been into "Fantasy", but I had read the first three Dragonlance books (that's a post for another day), and so I had some idea of what I was getting into. Needless to say, I was immediately hooked - in fact, far more than the two other people I was gaming with. I quickly bought the 2nd Edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual, and the over the next few years, I bought EVERYTHING that TSR produced - settings, Class handbooks, DM's guides...the works. The biggest problem, unfortunately, was lack of players, since I was living in a fairly rural small town in Maine, and my high school peers, for the most part, weren't interested in gaming.

When I moved off to college in 1995, I brought most of my gaming materials with me, certain that I'd be able to find a DnD group at a large urban university. But of course, as soon as I found some nerdy brethren and asked who played D&D, I received mocking laughter. "We don't play that game, you dork. We play White Wolf games. Those are real role-playing games".

I got sucked into a Werewolf: the Apocalypse game, and really enjoyed it, and I played a little Vampire and a little Mage as well. My RPG tastes began to grow, and I started buying other games, surprised that there were dozens of games put out by a wide variety of publishers in any genre you could think of. And of course, this was the late '90s, when the Internet gave us the ability to communicate around the world and share documents online with each other, enabling the explosion of what is commonly known as the "indie gaming" revolution. New voices emerged in the industry, edgy people with games that strayed far from the staid boundaries of D&D, GURPS, Rifts, World of Darkness, and other, more established platforms.

Fast-forward twenty years, and the more things change, the more they stay the same. Dungeons and Dragons is now well into its fifth - and most popular - edition, and most of the old guard are still around in one form or another. But smaller, indie presses and self-published games continue to arrive on the scene almost daily. In addition, the disdain most D&D folks had for the 4th edition rules, coupled with the death of D&D co-creator Gary Gygax back in 2008 sparked the "Old School Renaissance", where many gamers went back to the old editions of the game, breathing life back into them and using the bones of their rules sets to create a huge variety of different games.

Over the decades, I've collected a lot of role-playing games. Far more than I ever have, or ever could, play. I don't know what the current number is, but it is probably creeping up towards a hundred different RPGs and/or editions. And yet, that barely scratches the surface of what's out there, even from larger game companies, never mind "indie" developers. It's interesting that Dungeons and Dragons is more popular and more mainstream than it has ever been, and yet, most people have no idea of the immense variety of games out there - settings, play styles, rules types - whatever your interests might be, there is likely a game for you. And, just to give a minuscule taste, here's a YouTube video I watched last night, which dips a toe into the fathomless pool of games out there:

Yes, the video is a bit long, but if you have any curiosity about role-playing games, it is definitely worth your time to watch, and certainly better than me trying to pitch a bunch of different games. Oh, and it is worth noting that of the ten games they mention, I only own one of these - Call of Cthulhu - and it's an old edition. So if I own nearly a hundred RPGs, and only 1 of them is on this list, that gives you some idea of the variety out there.

BOOK REVIEW: HAWKER #1 Florida Firefight by Randy Wayne White

Full disclosure: I was offered a free copy of this ebook by the publisher in exchange for a review. You can buy Florida Firefight on Amazon by following this link.

I'd never read any of the HAWKER novels back in the day, so the new ebook version was my first exposure to the series, which starts from a premise well-known to anyone who likes vigilante fiction from the '60s through the '80s. Courts are soft on crime, lawyers are all scumbags, and cops are either incompetent administrators gunning for a run on a political ticket in the future, or tough, hard-bitten streetwise crusaders trying to keep the criminal element in check, while constantly being undermined by "the system". Meanwhile, gangs of violent psychopaths and drug dealers roam the city streets like some kind of Tolkien-esque invasion of orcs and goblins.

Enter Hawker, a cop who doesn't play by the rules, blah blah blah. He kills a bad guy against orders and winds up resigning from the force, only to be hired by a reclusive millionaire to become a one-man vigilante army. You know the deal - the Punisher, but with better financing. To start the series off, Hawker goes to Mahogany Bay, a south Florida town where some Colombian drug-running bad guys are pushing around the townsfolk while using their land for smuggling purposes.

Hawker goes down there and purports to be the new owner of the Tarpon Inn, a formerly successful tourist spot which has definitely seen better days. He immediately gets into a fight with some of the Colombians and gets his butt kicked, but then beats up their leader and pulls a gun on them. He soon hooks up with a Native American woman named Winnie Tiger who is a biologist working in Mahogany Bay, and the only one who helps Hawker when he first encounters the Colombians. There is sexual tension from the get-go, and eventually they have sex. Of course.

I don't really need to give the shot-by-shot plot structure of the book - that's easy enough to find and it's a short book anyway, with a quick enough tempo that ensures an engaged reader will zip through it in a couple of evenings or a lazy Sunday. There's a good amount of gun porn and the violence is suitably visceral, with people getting shot, stabbed, punched, blown up, set on fire...even violated with an air tank and inflated to death (more on that later). While the body count isn't extreme, it is substantial enough to satisfy those whose primary reason for reading such fare is the satisfaction of punks and thugs getting their comeuppance.

And, to be fair, the plot did take me a bit by surprise. Hawker doesn't just go to Mahogany Bay and start slaughtering Colombians. Instead, he actually spends a couple of months in the town, working with the locals to bolster both their pride, and the town's economy. One of the more satisfying scenes in the book involves the townsfolk attacking the Colombians' stronghold and giving them a thorough whupping - sans killing, for the most part. Hawker had cautioned the locals against turning into killers, and there is an impressive amount of restraint and moral obligation there. Of course, even in the few moments where Hawker himself tries non-lethal means to deal with his foes, circumstances conveniently force him to proceed otherwise, and he does the lion's share of the killing in the book, aided by the Tarpon Inn's cook and bartender, both of whom are more than they appear.

I also really enjoyed Hawker using a (in 1984 terms) advanced computer system to track down information about the various players in the situation and gain an information advantage over them. Most of the protagonists in these books, if they do computerized information gathering at all, outsource that to some nerdish ally who is a "computer genius". While Hawker was trained by such a genius on how to do this, he does do it all himself, employing some convenient hacking software and an old-school phone modem to search various databases, even planting a false identity at one point to establish his cover. I hope this is something that continues throughout the series.

Unfortunately for readers in 2016, there are a lot of cringe-worthy parts in the book. Without exception, all of the "good guys" are white, while all of the "bad guys" are minorities. Even the alluring ("mystical" of course) Winnie Tiger is secretly in cahoots with the bad guys. There's one white German bodyguard of a bad guy, but Hawker hints that he thinks the guy is gay, calling him "...a candidate for AIDS disease.", a line that was so stunning, it took me a moment to even grasp its full, historical, implications. There's also a "hulking mulatto" named Simio (...really...?), given all the usual apelike descriptive portraiture, who likes to inflict pain as a strongman for the Big Bad Guy of the novel. Hawker kills him in a horrible fashion when Simio's pants split at the backseam during a fight, exposing his buttocks, and Hawker rams the nozzle of an air tank in Simio's backdoor and turns the valve, inflicting horrific trauma upon Simio's insides. I'm sure a Freudian could write a paper on that scene alone.

Setting aside racial and homophobic issues for gendered ones, there are four female characters in the book. Winnie Tiger, the mystical Indian woman who has sex with and then tries to kill Hawker, two large-breasted blondes who both die only after their shirts are ripped open to expose their assets in death, and Hawker's ex-wife, with whom he has dinner with before going to Florida, and who he almost, but I think does not, has sex with. She factors into about three or four pages of the book and is then completely irrelevant, making me wonder why she's even included except as a possible means to make Hawker seem more three-dimensional. Police Sergeant Dee Dee McCall (HUNTER television series, debuting the same year - 1984 - as this book) would not be impressed with the gender politics of Florida Firefight.

If you can get past these usual, rather uncomfortable artifacts (and if you made it past the first chapter, I'm sure you can), this is still a satisfying read for fans of such "serial vigilante" books. The ebook edition is well-formatted and there aren't any OCR typos that I noticed, typical for Open Road Media's products, which are usually very well done.

Book Review: THE ASSASSIN'S BETRAYAL by Mark Allen

I've known Mark Allen for a while now as a fellow author, blogger, and all-round action-adventure novel enthusiast. We've been corresponding back and forth for years, and we talked a lot about his planning of the sequel / not-sequel to his first full-length novel, THE ASSASSIN'S PRAYER, which came out a couple of years ago, and did pretty darn well. Mark liked how some things turned out, but in retrospect wished he'd done other things a little differently.

The result of all that experience and contemplation is THE ASSASSIN'S BETRAYAL, and I have to say, the wait was worth it. This story has everything that Mark pulled off to perfection in his first novel, and polished smooth any rough spots the first book might have had. There's action, there's sex, there's gunfights and swordplay, knives and chainsaws, welcoming dive bars and swimming pools filled with hungry sharks. In short, everything you need to tell an awesome, over-the-top-but-not-too-far action story, and make it a real page-turner.

And I say that last out of experience, because I downloaded the Kindle edition of the book late one night and read the first few pages before bed. Then next night, I picked up where I'd left off, and was so engrossed and caught up in the book's rapid-fire pacing, I stayed up well past one o'clock in the morning because I literally couldn't make myself put the book down and go to sleep - I knew I'd just lie there awake, wondering what was going to happen next.

So, if you're into the modern action-thriller genre, dig assassins and gunplay and a book with a significant body count, you cannot go wrong with THE ASSASSIN'S BETRAYAL. Pick it up!

Book Review: KILL ZONE by Zeke Mitchell

I must admit to feeling rather conflicted about this book. Author Zeke Mitchell clearly loves the "Men's Adventure" genre of fiction made so popular in the '60s through the '80s, as well as '80s action movies such as COBRA or INVASION U.S.A., and every ounce of that love was poured into writing this book. There are a bunch of direct and indirect references, both in tone and otherwise, that show the intent of making Kill Zone a child of its inspiration.

On the other hand, I think this diamond is still just a little too rough. While the author is able to craft a solid action sequence, and the overall plot of the book flows well enough as a series of action set pieces, I think the story definitely needed some more constructive criticism. I'll give a rundown in no particular order of importance:

- The term "kill zone" appears in the body of the book thirty-eight times. While using the title of one's work in the body of said work is fine in a rock ballad, in a novel it is generally frowned upon, and while once or twice is fine (that, "Okay, I get it" moment), several dozen instances are way too many, and immediately jar the reader out of the narrative. After finding multiple uses in the first chapter, I stopped reading to use the Kindle search feature - which gave me the total. If I am that distracted by the over-use of the term to stop reading and do a word search, this is a problem.

- I understand the desire to make the character a lone hero. Many of the best protagonists of the genre are "lone wolves", but when you pay attention to the books and movies in question, the protagonist is always interacting and balanced by a host of secondary, supporting characters. In this book, aside from "interacting" with bad guys by riddling them with bullets, Thorn only makes a couple of phone calls and delivers one or two extremely short bits of interactive dialogue. Without someone to play off against, either a partner or a recurring antagonist, we spend way too much time just reading Thorn's own inner monologue, which got somewhat tedious, especially during the more fast-paced combat sequences. The author really should have just focused on the action-reaction-action-reaction of the fights, rather than the repeated running mental commentary in Thorn's head, which slowed the pace of the text down somewhat.

- The author's writing style isn't going to work for everyone. Many short, clipped sentences, as well as paragraphs separated by other "paragraphs" of extremely short sentences, or even single-word paragraphs. While this device is good for demonstrating a pivotal moment, it's repetition throughout the novel weakens the impact of the device when it is needed most.

- Although it is just playing to the source material, I thought the idea that the government would send a single man - albeit highly successful and well-trained - to dismantle through violence a criminal empire responsible for a *global* drug epidemic a little far-fetched. Yes, I know, the one-man army trope is a classic one, but I feel the hyperbolic nature of the story was a little extreme, especially as this is the first book in the series. I feel like now, there isn't a lot of leverage to up the ante in subsequent stories. This complaint is just personal preference, but I would rather have seen a smaller, more "street level" story - perhaps Thorn being sent to nip in the bud a drug kingpin right on the verge of making it big, rather than one whose drugs are causing a global catastrophe affecting millions upon millions of lives.

All the above being said, I still enjoyed the book a lot. Technically, the ebook was well-formatted, and I only caught a couple of very minor typos, of the sort that always slip through no manner how carefully a book is proofread. The book's cover is absolutely superb, and no doubt has caught the eye of many of the book's buyers, leading to that "one-click" impulse buy, as does the short but very evocative product description. As of right now, Kill Zone's Amazon book ranking is hovering a little above 2,000 in the Kindle Store, which is extremely good for a debut indie novel.

In conclusion, if you're the sort who enjoys '80s action movies starring Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, et al, as well as serial Men's Adventure novels like The Executioner, Able Team, The Death Merchant, and so forth, I think you'll enjoy this book, and you can pick it up on Amazon by clicking here.. There's a ton of action right from the get-go involving fast cars, big guns, explosions, knives to the face, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, more explosions, people's heads being blown off, even bigger guns, and a couple more explosions. While I have been somewhat critical above, I hope the author doesn't take it as discouragement from writing more books in this series, but rather as helpful feedback.

Movie Review: BLACK MASS (2015)

I was able to attend an advance screening of the film BLACK MASS this past Thursday, followed by a question and answer period with Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, the two reporters who wrote the book the movie is based on, and who broke the original story behind the FBI's illegal ties with organized crime in Boston.

Long story short, BLACK MASS follows the twenty-year collusion between James "Whitey" Bulger and FBI agent John Connolly, Bulger and Connolly knew each other growing up in South Boston, and when they find each other on opposite sides of the law, Connolly enlists Bulger's assistance in getting information that'd be used in taking down the Mafia in Boston, and in return Connolly would work to prevent legal obstruction or investigation into Bulger's criminal enterprises.

As can be expected, nothing good comes from any of this.

As a film, BLACK MASS does an effective job of telling the basic bones of this story. Bulger and Connolly make this "devil's deal" and both profit from it, but eventually it becomes too well-known, and it falls apart. As with any historical drama like this, a lot of things get altered, cut, or combined in order to fit a dramatic two-hour cinematic narrative. This got discussed to some degree during the Q&A, where Lehr pointed out that Connolly's supervisor, played by Kevin Bacon in the film, is an amalgam of many supervisors over that twenty-year timeframe, but since constantly changing the characters would be confusing, a decision was made. There are a number of other places where this takes place, of course, and that's of course what happens with any movie of this type, and some of the changes are going to be more contentious than others.

When experiencing the film, the atmosphere throughout is creepy, dark, and highly disturbing. I don't feel it has that same sort of typical gangster movie "rise and fall" story that you see in GOODFELLAS or CASINO, where the crooks make it big, spend spend spend, get sloppy and squabble among each other, and finally cause their own downfall. You see Bulger buy one pair of "nice" shoes and give the shoemaker a generous wad of cash, and that's about it. They all still dress the same, drive the same boring cars, live in the same rather dumpy places, and in general, do not flaunt their wealth or status with parties, drugs, or girls (there is only one "party" scene, and that is a prelude to a murder). In fact, the only character that really conforms to this classic model is Connolly, who begins to "dress fancy" in tailored suits, wears a nice gold watch, and starts acting cocky and sloppy as he becomes more and more entangled with Bulger and his criminal enterprises.

Speaking of Bulger, he comes off more as some kind of slasher movie villain, rather than your average movie gangster. He is utterly cold, diabolical, and ruthless. While he cares for his mother, his brother Billy, and his son, he is more than capable of killing anyone else without any remorse and with only the slightest provocation. He is in no way a flashy, glorified "anti-hero" in any sense, because he displays almost zero human traits and very little of any qualities which one might want to emulate or aspire towards. There is also little indication of *why* Bulger does what he does - he just does it and keeps doing it. There is no goal or endgame, no troubled origin story driving his actions. He's a shark swimming through schools of fish, devouring and moving on without any qualms.

Bulger's portrayal, as well as the lack of any humor or levity whatsoever, works to make this movie emotionally draining. No one cracks a joke, there are no Joe Pesci moments, and the bleak, grimy backdrop of Boston's rather unflattering neighborhoods during some particularly bleak and grimy-looking periods of this city's history make it all the worse. Seriously, Boston isn't exactly a glamorous city, and this is before any of the work done in the last 20 years to make it look nicer and more visually appealing. Even City Hall and the other government buildings downtown add to this, with their miserably institutional appearances. I've been in City Hall several times over the years - it is an *ugly* building - a perfect backdrop for the ugly deals made within its walls during the film.

After the movie, there were more interesting points brought up during the Q&A. For example, when the Boston Globe story was being researched by Lehr and O'Neill, the focus wasn't on Bulger - it was on the corruption within the FBI, particularly as it tied into how the Bureau handled its Confidential Informants. Bulger just happened to be the biggest and boldest example of that corruption, and Connolly the Bureau's most flagrant bad boy. The film doesn't really touch on this at all, and the investigation of the problem seems almost entirely limited to the Bulger-Connolly situation. I don't know if this was done to help limit the scope of the film to something more tightly-focused, or if the filmmakers didn't want to paint the FBI with such a broad brush. Also, the authors, Lehr in particular (he handled most of the Q&A questions, since they were being asked by Boston University students and faculty and Lehr is a BU professor), were greatly concerned/worried that this story *would* go the "Goodfellas" route, and give it an air of glamour and anti-hero-ness, which they both wanted to avoid. But Lehr said after seeing a cut of the film back in May, he was happy to say the "darkness" of the subject matter was left intact.

Overall, I think this movie does a good job of portraying organized crime in the ugly, violent, horrible light it deserves. This isn't a stereotypical crime movie filled with flashy suits, fancy cars, piles of drugs, and lots of loose women. And, almost without exception, the violence isn't "action", but just sudden moments of brutality that make you glance away, feeling unclean for having witnessed the act. Frankly, I don't think it was a "bad" movie, but I am in no rush at all to see it again, if ever.

BOOK REVIEW: The Assassin's Prayer by Mark Allen

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Mark Allen was a "slow burn" indie writer who put out a number of short stories and novellas in the beginning of his indie career, most of which sold a very modest amount of copies. However, with his first full-length novel, THE ASSASSIN'S PRAYER, Allen's success as an indie writer took off in a very impressive fashion. Now, although his sales have slowed slightly since the book's initial release, Allen's novel of bloodshed and redemption is still going strong.

THE ASSASSIN'S PRAYER is the story of Travis Kain, a killer-for-hire who once worked for the CIA, but now most often sells his services to organized crime. He lives in a state of almost constant melancholy after the death of his wife several years ago, using violence to dull the pain of his loss.

When we meet him, Kain is contracted to kill off another organized crime "made man" of some considerable status, and while the job goes mostly as planned, there are complications involving some innocent witnesses. Kain has vowed to never harm innocents (part of the "prayer" which gives the book its title), and so walks away from tying off these loose ends, an act that has serious consequences for him later on.

Kain also runs into an old flame from years gone by, and this kindles some old passions he thought were long-dead. There's a lot of conflicting emotions going on, as Kain tries to sort out his feelings for this old flame while still hurting from the loss of his wife.

To further complicate matters, the CIA - who never drop a grudge - sends one of their top "operators" after Kain, because apparently his departure from the Agency was less than mutually accepted. The operator who goes after Kain is a real sumbitch, and he's got a whole cadre of other sumbitches along with him.

All of this comes together to create a pretty action-packed, dramatic novel. Allen is a big fan of the action genre, and heaps it on with gusto. The violence is bloody and unforgiving, and some of the fights are spectacularly gruesome. If you're not into vivid depictions of violence and gore, this may not be the book for you.

Taken as a whole, TAP is a solid debut novel. There are a couple of major coincidences that form plot points in the story, and they'll either make or break a reader's enjoyment of the novel; either you'll accept them and move on, or you'll lose your suspension of disbelief and fall out of the story. I was willing to carry on and swallow the coincidences, but I'm sure it'll be a deal-breaker for some readers.

There is also a lot of emotional conflict, most of it tied to both the death of Kain's wife and the rediscovery of his long-lost flame, but there's also some deep-seated angst regarding his former best friend, whom Kain now despises. There were several times I just wanted Kain to cowboy up and quit weeping into his whiskey. If I wanted to be cheeky, I'd refer to Kain as an "Emo Assassin", but since the story moves at a pretty brisk clip, the maudlin moments don't slow the story down, and I think it helps distinguish Kain from the legion of near-robotic Grim Hired Assassins out there. Some other reviewers clearly liked a more complicated, emotional protagonist, while others found it annoying. As usual, your mileage may vary.

So if you're interested in a cool Hired Killer Thriller, consider picking up THE ASSASSIN'S PRAYER. And if you're such a cheapskate that you don't want to invest $2.99 on the book, check out some of his other works, such as "The Killing Question" and "Resurrection Bullets". Allen has quite the collection of varied short stories, and I'm sure there's something for everyone.

Meet My Main Character - Jamie "Hangman" Lynch

My friend and fellow author Justin Aucoin has asked me to carry the torch for another leg in a great "Meet My Main Character" blog-hop. This is an opportunity for writers to introduce to readers the main character of a work in progress or soon-to-be-published work. So, I'm picking Jamie Lynch, the MC of my current work in progress.

Before reading more, be sure to check out Justin's blog post, where we meet his main character, Jake Hawking.

1) What is the name of your character? Is he/she fictional or a historic person?

My character's name is Jamie "Hangman" Lynch. He's a fictional character, part of my "Lynch Family Legacy" of characters featured in my other books, such as KILLER INSTINCTS and my COMMANDO series of WW2 novels. Jamie is the son of COMMANDO's Tommy Lynch and uncle to KI's William Lynch.

2) When and where is the story set?

The story is set in 1973, and starts in San Diego, California. The story quickly moves up the coast to San Francisco, where events take place all over the Bay area, from Palo Alto to Bodega Bay.

3) What should we know about him/her?
 
Jamie's 24 years old in 1973. He's a former sergeant in the United States Army, 5th Special Forces Group, and from 1970-72, served in the top-secret Military Assistance Command, Vietnam - Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). Previous to that, he was a corporal in the 101st Airborne Division, and fought in the Battle of Hamburger Hill in 1969, where he was wounded. In 1973, Jamie has been out of the military for about nine months, living above a surf shop along Mission Beach in San Diego.

4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?

Jamie made it back from Vietnam in fairly good shape, both physically and mentally. He suffered a few minor wounds, but he's in prime physical condition. Mentally he's doing okay, although he has recurring dreams and nightmares about the war. Most recently, his dreams have involved going back to the war, and even though in some of his dreams he gets killed, the overall sense in his dreams is that Jamie is happy to be back "home" in the war. He's self-aware enough to realize that the hum-drum civilian life isn't for him; he's spent his entire adult life so far in the military, training for and fighting in a war, and now he's basically a beach bum, living off some money set aside and working a part-time job in the surf shop he lives above.  Jamie begins to feel like "a tiger in a cage, restless and confined", and worries that one day he'll channel that aggression and confined feeling in a way that will wind up with him in jail, dead, or some other unfortunate outcome.

So, Jamie gets in touch with General Carson, an officer who used to be Jamie's CO back in Vietnam. He confesses his problems and asks Carson for help. Carson tells Jamie he knows of a businessman up in San Francisco, the head of a tech company with strong ties to military technology research, who is in need of someone with Jamie's skill set to "solve a problem". Jamie, not caring much what the problem is and only knowing it'd give him an escape from his cage of inactivity and boredom, accepts the job. A great deal of violent conflict ensues shortly thereafter.

5) What is the personal goal of the character?

Jamie's primary motivation throughout the story is to find purpose in his civilian life. Like many veterans, he's come back to the "real world" after being in the military for over five years, and the Army is the only adult life he's ever known, and his skills-set is, at the very least, pretty specific. He can't picture himself living the life of a 9-to-5 office dweller, driving to work every morning in a station wagon, typing up reports and sitting in meetings, then going home at the end of the day to a house surrounded by a white picket fence, containing a darling wife and two perfect children. Even at the young age of 24, Jamie firmly believes there's no way that kind of life is his destiny.

On the other hand, Jamie understands that selling his lethal skills in the private sector is a dangerous game. As the story unfolds, and the events begin to spiral out of control, with more and more collateral damage and unforeseen consequences, Jamie realizes he's essentially a murderous criminal, and there's a good chance his actions might get him killed or sent to prison for the rest of his life - exactly the sort of outcome he was trying to avoid in the first place. On the other hand, he's got several other characters in the story, especially the mysterious gun-for-hire named Richard, affirming that this is the life for him. It becomes a tug-of-war between Jamie's moral character, and his belief in his ultimate place in the world outside of the Army.

6) Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?
 
The book is titled HANGMAN: SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER. I hope this will be the first in a series of short novels featuring Jamie as he goes on further adventures, all under the HANGMAN series title. I wrote a teaser blog post regarding the book here.

7) When can we expect the book to be published?

I hope to have the first draft completed by the beginning of May, and off to a small cadre of interested Beta readers. Depending on their feedback, and the amount of rewriting I have to do nor not do, I hope to have the novel out on Amazon for the Kindle and Trade Paperback formats some time in June.

UPDATE: Author Mark Allen is the next stop on this blog-hop - you can meet his main character, Travis Kain, here on his page.

MOVIE REVIEW: Sabotage (2014)

When I first saw the trailers for Sabotage, I was enthused but otherwise wasn't expecting much. I've been happy to see Schwarzenegger making a Hollywood comeback, because even in his "retirement" years, he's still a badass. I really enjoyed The Last Stand, and even Escape Plan was a lot of fun, if somewhat goofy.

So, this latest action flick looked to be more of the same. Dudes with guns running around killing other dudes with guns, some chases, some revenge, some shots of Arnold glowering menacingly. Pretty standard stuff, really. Right?

Wrong.

This movie is brutal. I don't mean brutal as in Commando-era Arnold running around hosing down countless pissant soldiers who pirouette and drop to the ground when shot. I mean gruesomely, unrelentingly violent. This is easily the most graphically violent movie Schwarzenegger has ever done, and I don't say that lightly. While his movies have high body counts, and some (like Total Recall) have some messy bits, the graphic, in-your-face nature of the violence in Sabotage is unique to his career. While I can get icked out by torture scenes in movies, graphic violence usually doesn't phase me much...but I was uncomfortable at times with this film, and that's saying something.

Furthermore, this is Arnold like we've never seen him before. There has always been at least a hint that Schwarzenegger is winking to the audience in his movies. The "I'll be back" line, the posing with the guns a la Commando, the corny one-liners, and so forth. We've come to expect it, to the point where we don't even notice it until it's gone. But in Sabotage, there's none of that Schwarzenegger self-referentialism. I won't say he's "acting" better than ever, but he is able to, more than I've ever seen him, put away his Hollywood MegaStar-ness and just play a role as straight as possible, without any mugging or otherwise playing "Arnold".

As for the movie itself, there's nothing truly original or jaw-dropping here. Schwarzenegger plays "Breacher" Wharton, an old, grizzled DEA door-kicker (thus, the "Breacher" moniker) who leads an undercover team of agents who infiltrate drug organizations, then tear them apart. These guys are the DEA version of Delta Force and Seal Team Six, unconventional warfare types who roll with lots of tattoos and facial hair and highly customized kit loadouts. As the movie opens, they're taking down some drug cartel and they hide ten million dollars in cash on the premises, hoping to steal the money for themselves, but when they return for the money, someone's taken it. Whoops.

Come to find out, the FBI was running an operation in parallel with theirs, and knew how much money was in the place, so the fact that ten million dollars is missing doesn't go unnoticed, either by the DEA or the Cartel, who doesn't like losing their money to the government, but likes having it stolen by government agents for their own personal use even less. But of course, the thieves can't tell anyone it was stolen from them without admitting they stole it in the first place. Six months of investigation and interrogation by the DEA, and none of the members breaks, and they're finally - begrudgingly - put back on the job.

I don't want to give away any spoilers, because this movie does have a few twists and turns that are definitely worth keeping hidden. Suffice to say, some members of the team start getting killed. Breacher and the surviving members begin to turn on each other, assuming that the Cartel is coming after their money, and they all begin to suspect that someone on the team beat the rest to the money and took it for themselves. We also begin to learn some dark aspects of Breacher's past, as well as seeing the tensions and conflicts within the team. Operators who always live on the ragged edge of right and wrong can lose track of where the line is drawn, and that becomes a very scary place to live.

Badass Digest, one of my favorite film and television websites, wrote a really good review of this film, one that I more or less agree with. This isn't a "great movie", but it is one of the best Schwarzenegger movies, and if you're a fan of his films, you really need to see this. Even after more than 30 years of movie stardom, the big guy can still surprise us.

BOOK REVIEW: Dirty Harry #1 - Duel for Cannons

The first three Dirty Harry movies came out between 1971 and 1976. Then, there was a hiatus of seven years, until 1983's Sudden Impact. With the franchise dead going into the '80s, Warner Books decided to begin a series of media tie-in novels (although I doubt they were called that at the time) featuring the eponymous maverick cop and his Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum. The series ran from 1981 to March of 1983, nine months before Sudden Impact was released. The series was written by two authors; Ric Meyers (who wrote the Ninja Master books) and Leslie Alan Horvitz, a writer I'm unfamiliar with. Meyers apparently wrote #'s 1, 3, 5, 8, 9, and 11.

The first book in the series, Duel for Cannons, opens with the line, "Boopsie's head exploded". The unfortunate Boopsie is a guy in a cartoon-figure suit at a knockoff Disney World-esque theme park in California. Boopsie is killed by a gunman who then gets chased by an off-duty San Antonio sheriff visiting the amusement park with his family. The sheriff gets drawn into a running gun battle with the shooter, and is eventually killed. Of course, the deceased is an old friend of Harry Callahan's, and Callahan doesn't take kindly to his friends being killed, even less so when the killer makes it look like the death was actually the sheriff pulling off a mass murder/suicide.

Although everyone else almost immediately dismisses the inconsistencies in the case, Harry pursues the evidence, and eventually uncovers a shadowy killer who seems to be trying to draw Harry to San Antonio. Eventually Harry goes there, and discovers that H. A. Striker, a wealthy business magnate, essentially runs the city, owns the cops, and gets to do whatever he wants. Striker had been opposed by the Sheriff, and one of his underlings, a tactically brilliant investigator named Nash. Harry teams up with Nash to try and bring down Striker, who is actually furious that the assassin - a .44 Magnum-loving killer named Sweetboy Williams -  lured Harry to San Antonio. Striker tries to get Harry arrested or driven off several times, only to get foiled on every occasion.

The story culminates with a ton of gunplay, as Striker tries to use a captured Nash as bait to lure Harry into a place where his bought cops - or Williams - can kill Harry. There's a ridiculous amount of gunfire and stuff getting smashed / shot / blown up, and although the killing isn't too gratuitous, at least one bad guy gets his head "blown clean off". I don't want to give away the details - there are a few twists and turns - but the ending is pretty satisfying, although the middle third of the book does sag a bit, and I found the whole plot a little hard to believe. With the police corruption looking SO blatant and rampant in San Antonio, and with the amount of evidence Nash gathers on Striker's doings, I don't see how he couldn't have just passed the information on to the FBI or some other, larger agency.

But overall, I found Duel for Cannons to be great fun. I've recently re-watched the first three Dirty Harry movies, and this book definitely references his filmic adventures extensively. One minor deviation is that DiGiorgio, an inspector who appears in all three earlier movies, is alive in this book, while (SPOILER) he's killed midway through The Enforcer. I suppose he was too good a secondary character to leave dead and buried, since his chubby, laid-back persona is a great counterpoint to Harry's belligerent, wound-up personality. There's also enough time spent in San Francisco dealing with punks and criminals there, that I'm looking forward to later stories taking place in the city itself. Meyers is able to capture and reproduce a lot of Harry's personality, and I can easily hear Eastwood speaking the dialogue in the book with Harry's typical laconic delivery.

It looks like Amazon has most, if not all of these books available for a somewhat reasonable price used, assuming you're not looking for mint condition specimens. I've already ordered the second book in the series, and I'll review it as soon as I can.

Teaser Post: HANGMAN: SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER

I just wanted to take a moment and update readers on one of my current projects. I'm working on a new novel, tentatively titled HANGMAN: SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER. Those of you who've read KILLER INSTINCTS might get the reference, but for those of you who missed it, "Hangman" was Jamie Lynch's call-sign while a member of SOG during the Vietnam war. Jamie is the uncle of William Lynch, the protagonist in KILLER INSTINCTS. Jamie is also the older son of Thomas Lynch, the main character in my COMMANDO series.

This (first) HANGMAN novel is being written for two reasons. First, to bridge the generation gap between Thomas and William Lynch. When I originally began writing KILLER INSTINCTS, my intent was to go back through the generations and write about each of the Lynch men who went to war, what I'd called at the time the Lynch Legacy. The first COMMANDO novel was the first completed volume in this idea, but I'd actually written the first thousand words of HANGMAN while writing KILLER INSTINCTS. Only now, over two years later, am I finally going back and writing the rest of the story.

The second reason for writing this book is to try and write a kick-ass '70s-style Men's Adventure novel. In 1973, Jamie Lynch has been out of the Army for a little less than a year, and he's going stir-crazy living the life of a beach bum in San Diego. After getting in touch with his old commanding officer, Jamie is given a job working for Steiger, a Silicon Valley CEO. One of Steiger's top engineers has gone missing after stealing a prototype for an ordnance guidance system, and Steiger fears the prototype will fall into the hands of one of his competitors. Lynch teams up with Blake, Steiger's chief of security, as well as an enigmatic mercenary gunslinger named Richard...

SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER is going to be violent. It's going to be crass. It's going to get ugly. People are going to get killed in not-very-nice ways. There's a lot of drinking and swearing and even a little sex. There's cars and guns and arson and torture. The good guys aren't so great, but the bad guys are even worse.

I'll probably have the first draft of the manuscript finished by the first week of April. I'll be looking for some beta readers, so if you're interested, shoot me an email and I'll put you on the list. My target date for publication is June 1st.

BOOK REVIEW: Hardman #1 - Atlanta Deathwatch by Ralph Dennis

Despite its somewhat unfortunate series name (right up there with The Penetrator, I think), this opening volume in the HARDMAN series is some pretty solid, gritty, sleazy, hard-boiled goodness. I decided to pick up Atlanta Deathwatch after author Lee Goldberg repeatedly sung the series' praises on Facebook, and I was able to acquire a copy cheaply via Amazon. Sadly, it being forty years old and not printed on the highest-quality materials, my copy is pretty fragile. The first page or two fell out while I was reading it, and I had to be careful in holding the book open by the middle of the pages lest the pages start separating from the spine at the bottom of the book.

Hardman (that's actually his last name, not just the series title) is an ex-cop, kicked off the force for dating a woman later revealed to be involved in an organized crime money laundering scheme. Hardman himself was a "clean cop", but once given the boot, he turned to any job that paid the bills. As the story opens, he's tailing a co-ed named Emily Campbell, whose father is a politician concerned that she's getting mixed up with a bad crowd. Hardman follows her to a blacks-only bar, and winds up getting the crap beat out of him by a couple of black guys who show up in a car after Hardman gets eyeballed by one of the bar's occupants. Strong-armed into dropping the job, Hardman bows out and goes to work for another employer, taking a trip to NYC where he picks up a briefcase full of heroin!

Turns out Hardman will do pretty much anything for cash, and his partner, Hump Evans, a towering black ex-football player, feels the same way. They've been making the NYC drug run regularly along with their small-time "problem solving" gigs. When Hardman and Evans get back to Atlanta, they find out Emily Campbell has been murdered, and soon all signs point to a former boyfriend, Eddie Spense, a troublemaker with a history of violent tendencies and bad behavior. Soon, Hardman finds himself working for a Black Mafia kingpin known only as The Man, a shadowy figure who, we discover, has been romantically involved with Emily for a while now.

The plot from this point on gets fairly complex, and I don't want to give away any spoilers, so I'll end the synopsis here. The book cover erroneously labels Hardman as a PI, and at one point Hardman's former partner comments on how he shouldn't really be doing PI work, since he isn't one. The legally ambiguous nature of Hardman's activities is one of the more amusing aspects of the novel. Early on, Hardman's former partner warns him that he better not find Hardman carrying a gun, but then later on has no problem with it when Hardman kills someone trying to kill him first, and at the end of the novel, Hardman even goes on a raid of sorts with Hump Evans and another plainclothes officer, the three of them armed to the teeth. I do like how Hardman has one foot on either side of the law, and - typical for these kinds of sleazy, hard-boiled stories - everyone seems to be more or less okay with that arrangement.

There's a whole laundry list of little gems to be found in this story. Hardman and Hump are always - always - drinking, everything from beer to wine to Scotch to cognac. There's one scene near the end of the book where they're on a stakeout, tailing one of the conspirators, and passing back and forth a half-pint bottle of Hennessy. This being the 70's, and these two clearly having cast-iron livers, no one ever gets so much as a buzz on, the cognac merely providing warmth on a cold night-time stakeout. Practically every time they return to Hump's apartment, the two of them break out a bottle of J&B scotch or a few beers. After all, what good is a paid sleuth if he's not half-sauced all the time?

I also dig the way the story handles guns. Weapons are described very simply, but everyone's got a basic, functional piece tucked away somewhere. Hardman carries around an old Colt .38 Police Positive, and Hump has a .38 Hardman once pocketed off a drunk - a "clean" gun, so to speak. Hump also has a fancy double-barreled shotgun given to him as a gift in his football days. Eddie Spence has a .45 automatic - possibly taken while he was in the Navy - and random hoods have .32 caliber "Saturday Night Specials". Then there's pump shotguns here and there, plus a "machine pistol" described as WW2-era German, probably an unlisted "souvenir" MP-40. The "world" so to speak of the novel gives the feel that everyone has access, somehow, to a "piece" tucked away in a shoebox or a sock drawer somewhere.

There's also a lot of racial tension in the story. On more than one occasion, the "partnership" between Hardman and Hump is questioned, with people typically thinking Hump works for Hardman, rather than with him, but Hardman always makes it clear that they are partners, on equal footing. Hump is also shown to be Hardman's equal in terms of his ability to come up with ideas and angles to the investigation - he's not just a big bruiser, he's smart, too. Things also get complicated when Hardman and Hump deal with The Man, especially with respect to The Man's status with his own men and how they view his dealings with this white ex-cop and his black partner. There's another layer of tension when it is clear not all of The Man's underlings liked the idea of their boss in love with a white woman. I could list many more examples, but suffice to say, the novel handles race in a pretty sophisticated way, especially given it was written in 1974.

I will agree with a couple of comments I've seen on Facebook, that the HARDMAN series looks superficially like a "Men's Adventure" series, especially the look of the cover, the series title and names for the individual books - everything looks like it could be a much more action-oriented series. However, the level of violence is pretty low, and actually a lot of the book's body count takes place off-camera. This is much more of a hard-boiled PI / cop mystery thriller than Men's Adventure. Still, I found the book highly enjoyable, and a very fast read once I got into it - I read the last two-thirds of the book in one evening. I'll probably pick up the next book in the series, although I'm not sure when I'll get to it, but if Atlanta Deathwatch is typical of the series, it'll be a fun, sleazy ride.

Movie Review - Snitch (2013)

In 2003's The Rundown, there's a moment as Dwane "The Rock" Johnson's character walks into a nightclub when he passes Arnold Schwarzenegger, making a cameo appearance in the film. Schwarzenegger nods to him and says "Have fun" with a knowing look on his face. Although only three films into his Hollywood career, it was clearly understood by anyone paying attention to Johnson that he was going to be the spiritual successor to Schwarzenegger's Hollywood legacy.

Ten years later, I think it's fair to say that prediction was spot-on. Dwane Johnson has gone on to make a number of films in a variety of genres, from kids movies (Race to Witch Mountain, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, The Tooth Fairy, The Game Plan) to dramas (Gridiron Gang, Southland Tales) to action-oriented movies spanning the spectrum from gritty thrillers like Faster to his historical fantasy films in the Mummy series, from sci-fi splatterfests like DOOM to G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Lately, Johnson has found a place in the last two Fast and Furious franchise films, and he's listed as having a part in the next film as well.

I say all this to illustrate a point; his very impressive career, spanning a relatively short time frame, while touching on a wide variety of films, mimics in many ways Schwarzenegger's own career over the 80's and 90's. If anything, I think Johnson has proven his ability to handle a range of movies that's even greater than Schwarzenegger's, especially in being cast in movies that aren't just comedies, but children's films. And yet, at the same time, he can go on to make films that are brutally violent (Faster is a perfect example here).

OK, three paragraphs in and I haven't talked about Snitch. This 2013 film stars Johnson as John Matthews, the owner of a small but apparently successful trucking company that specializes in construction. His son from his first marriage, a newly-minted 18 year old, does something incredibly stupid and gets arrested with a very sizable amount of Ecstasy on him. Federally-mandated sentences for drug-related charges in this volume dictate that the young man is going to prison for at least the next ten years, unless he can aid the government in making other drug arrests. Unfortunately for Matthews' son, the only drug dealer he knows is the friend who sent him the Ecstasy - the same friend who rolled over to the cops and got him busted in the first place.

In a panic over the thought of his son going to jail for the next ten years (a sentence Matthews worries the boy won't even survive), Matthews pleads with the prosecuting attorney (icily played by Susan Sarandon), offering his own services in making arrests on his son's behalf. At first the offer is rejected, but when Matthews uses an ex-con on his employ to get an introduction with a local drug lord, the attorney agrees to make a deal if Matthews is successful.

From there, the plot really kicks off. Matthews uses his trucking business as a means to transport drugs and cash, but it turns out that the local drug lord is involved with a Mexican Cartel kingpin, a whole other magnitude of danger for Matthews. When it is made clear to him that his chances of getting out of the situation alive are next to nothing if he tries to play ball with the Cartel and the government at the same time, he takes matters into his own hands to see things through to the end.

What I liked most about Snitch is how surprisingly low-key the whole movie is. If this had been a Schwarzenegger vehicle back in the late 80's or early 90's, Matthews would probably have had a military background, a locker full of guns...well never mind - he made this movie, and it was called Commando. And while Johnson is involved in some gunplay during the climax of the movie, to my best recollection, he doesn't throw a single punch the entire film. In fact, Johnson's physicality is almost a non-factor in this film; the role could have been taken by almost any actor. The fact that someone felt that Johnson had the dramatic chops to handle the part speaks volumes for his talents, especially his approachability as a human being. While Schwarzenegger made a career out of his near-superhuman presence, Johnson comes off in most of his films as surprisingly human, even when he's at his most Herculean in the F&F movies or the G.I. Joe film.

As much as it pains me to say this as a lifelong Schwarzenegger fan, I think Johnson will go on to, if not match his predecessor's reputation, perhaps even exceed it someday.

Movie Review: Code of Silence (1985)

I wouldn't say I am a huge Chuck Norris fan, but there are a number of his movies I really enjoy, Delta Force, Missing in Action, Lone Wolf McQuade, and Invasion U.S.A. among them. However, there are a number of other Norris movies, what I consider "second shelf", which are still extremely watchable, and Code of Silence is one of them.

I'm always amused by what movie poster, if any, is used to represent an actor on their IMDb page; Jean Claude Van Damme uses a photo from Hard Target, and Chuck Norris' photo is from the poster for Code of Silence. I've no idea if the actors themselves picked those photos or if some fan just thought it was the best look, but Norris holding a heavily choked 12-gauge shotgun one-handed by its pistol grip is a pretty badass look if you ask me.

Plotwise, the movie isn't terribly complicated. Norris plays Eddie Cusack, a Chicago police sergeant on the tactical team who is going after your typical crime family. Turns out, however, that Cusack and company aren't the only ones; another criminal gang is gunning for them as well. To make matters worse, one of Cusack's subordinates is under suspicion of shooting an innocent teenage boy and planting a pistol on the kid. Cusack is a real straight man, almost a pariah already in his department for walking the straight and narrow too easily. When he speaks out against his fellow officer, the rest of the department shuns him, which isn't good when you're caught up in the middle of a gang war.

Overall, this is a pretty gritty, "realistic" movie. There's plenty of gunplay and martial arts action, car chases and explosions, but I don't consider this movie anywhere near as over-the-top as other Norris movies such as Invasion U.S.A.. Although the movie was made in 1985, it lacks the, for lack of a better term, "brightness" of a movie like Commando. Instead, CoS is a dark, gloomy movie, filled with overcast skies, dingy locations, lots of grimy brick and steel, and a cast of characters that definitely fall outside the usual range of pretty Hollywood faces. The movie looks and feels to me like it should be a decade older than it is, but I don't really consider that a bad thing. The one really oddball factor in this movie is the introduction of a "police robot", a remote-controlled / semi-autonomous wheeled combat system kitted with a frightening array of missiles and heavy machine guns. While this thing is over-armed even for a combat robot in Iraq in 2012, it is utterly ridiculous for Chicago in 1985. Oh, and it might as well have had "Chekhov's Gun" painted across its hull...just saying...

So if you've never caught Code of Silence, give it a try. I found it on my On Demand lineup, but your mileage may vary, of course. You could probably pick it up at Amazon for a song, and if you're a Norris fan, I think it's worth having.

Labor Day Free Promotion for KILLER INSTINCTS

My vigilante revenge novel KILLER INSTINCTS is free for the Kindle today on Amazon. I set the promotion up last night and I was going to post the announcement this morning, not realizing how fast some people would pick up on it and start downloading. By 7:30 this morning I'd already had a dozen downloads, and I've had more than 70 so far - and it's not even 11 AM!  I'm currently at #13 for Kindle Men's Adventure. Hopefully we can climb into the single digits by the end of the day.

UPDATE: It's 12:00 PM, and I've hit 132 downloads so far today. I can't believe how well this promotion is working out. At this rate, I may extend the promotion deal into tomorrow.

UPDATE #2: It's 4:30, and there have been 300 downloads. The book is currently #2 in Men's Adventure Free fiction and #736 in all Kindle Free books. Talk about awesome!

Author Brian Drake Reviews KILLER INSTINCTS

Author and blogger Brian Drake has written a really insightful review of Killer Instincts. One of Brian's main points in the review is that in KI, the story isn't about the showdown between William and the Paggiano family, the story is about William's transformation from aimless college kid to cold-hearted killer. In short, the journey is the destination here.

Of course, I think Brian says it a lot better than I can. Check out the review on his blog, Brian Drake at Large.

 

Awesome Fan Film: PUNISHER '82

This was posted to the Facebook group "Men's Adventure Paperbacks of the 70's and 80's". Awesome short Punisher fan film with a host of classic Marvel bad guys battling it out against our favorite vigilante gunslinger. Check it out:

Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

I'll keep this relatively short. While I'm not a huge fan of comic book movies in general and the DC movies in particular, I thought Christopher Nolan's Batman reboot was fairly well done. A more "realistic", less cartoonish view of the character compared to the movies of the late 80's and 90's.

However, I didn't think TDKR was all that hot. I found it overly long, really slow and all too often, the overall effect was one of stentorian music with not all that much going on. That Christopher Nolan signature foghorn-esque BWWWWWWAAAAAAAMMMMMPPPPP was sounded a hundred times throughout the movie's two and three-quarter hours, and after about the third time, I was tired of it.

I'm not going to give this movie a blow-by-blow, but I just felt the idea was fundamentally flawed. We're given a detailed explanation of how battered and damaged Bruce Wayne's body is, and then by the end of the movie, after he's been beaten near to the point of death and spends MONTHS in some vile underground hell-pit, he's suddenly back in the peak of his physical conditioning.  I also find the hand-to-hand combat in all of the Nolan Batman movies abysmal, and this movie especially so.

Furthermore the entire plot device for the last half of the movie was really tiresome and wholly unbelievable, even by comic book standards. I understand this is "comic book reality", but you can't both make a "realistic, gritty comic book movie" and create a narrative that seems utterly unrealistic. Not to give much away, but essentially the city of twelve million people is suddenly cut off from the rest of the outside world for about five or six months.  There are apparently "shipments of food and supplies", but whatever. I'd imagine 90% of the population of the city would be dead due to starvation, violence, or general suffering by the time the bomb threat is a reality.

Oh yeah, the bomb threat. I will try hard to not spoil the ending, but let's just say a four-megaton nuclear weapon leaves...quite a footprint. Using this awesome website, you can see that a 4MT bomb will, at the very least, shatter windows up to around 30 miles away. Something to consider...

Anyhow, while people will no doubt be flocking to this movie for weeks to come, I just wasn't that enthralled.

The Guns of KILLER INSTINCTS Part 4: The Mooks and Gunsels

In the last of our four-part series on the guns that appear in my novel KILLER INSTINCTS, we look at the weapons carried by all the faceless goons, thugs, mooks, punks, and other assorted scum who find themselves at the wrong end of William's arsenal (see Part 1).

AK-47 7.62x39mm Assault Rifle

First up is the ubiquitous AK-47. The slavers on the Liberian freighter in the beginning of the novel all carry these, and one shows up in the hands of a sentry during the desert gunfight. The "AK" is such a common weapon in Men's Adventure fiction that I knew it had to make more than one appearance in the novel.

Steyr MPi 81 9mm Submachine Gun

This Steyr SMG is found in the hands of a better class of Liberian slaver, the guy only referred to as "Steyr-man" by William. Much like the Uzi, this is going to be the sort of weapon you'll find in the hands of various police forces, armies, mercenaries and criminals all over the world.

Remington 870 Wingmaster 12-Gauge Pump-Action Shotgun

In a couple of instances, pump-action 12-gauge shotguns make their appearances, usually while blasting away at our protagonists. In at least once instance they are referred to as "long-barreled", so a representative shotgun would be this Remington Wingmaster. While normally meant for duck-hunting, you could easily see some hillbilly put it to use for a more sinister purpose.

Colt M-4 5.56mm Assault Rifle

During the desert battle one of the bad guys burns off a mag from an assault rifle at William and Richard. Being the badass that he is, Richard guesses the make and model of the weapon just from its report.

Smith & Wesson Model 4506 .45ACP Automatic

Several bad guys throughout the book carry ".45 caliber automatics". I imagined for most of them that, rather than carrying a M1911-framed auto, it was something more akin to this S&W pistol. The large-frame .45 Smiths were popular back in the 90's, so having the book set in 2001, running across a couple of these makes sense.

Ingram MAC-10 .45ACP Submachine Gun

William gets fired upon out in the desert by someone using an "Ingram machine pistol". As it is such an iconic 80's action movie weapon, the "Big Mac Attack" MAC-10 needed to make at least a cameo appearance.

Smith & Wesson Model 627 .357 Magnum

Although never used in the desert gunfight, a .357 magnum revolver is recovered by William and Richard from a pickup truck.

Savage Arms Axis .30-06 Bolt Action Rifle

Like the .357 Magnum, William and Richard find a .30-06 bolt-action rifle with a scope after the desert gunfight. I wanted their opponents to have a combination of illegal para-military weapons and more common civilian hunting or defense weapons to represent their rural-criminal nature.

Olympic Arms 9mm Carbine

During the final gunfight, one of the Paggiano's gunmen uses a "nine-millimeter carbine". This OA 9mm would be a likely candidate.




 

Colt Detective Special .38 Special Revolver

One of the Paggiano's servants pulls a snubnose revolver on William near the end of the book. I figured it to be a more vintage pistol, like this Detective Special.

Remington 870 12-Gauge Pump-Action Shotgun

A couple of the Paggiano's guards have cut-down pump shotguns like this Remington. The photo here shows one fitted with what looks like a revolver's pistol-grip.

And, that's just about it. I may have missed something, but I didn't bother to give the make and modelof every weapon used in the book (only most of them). I'm a big fan of The Internet Move FirearmsDatabase (check it out - it's awesome), and I decided that, if KILLER INSTINCTS was a movie, Iwanted to create my equivalent of its IMFDb page here at Post Modern Pulp. I hope I did it justice.

The Guns of KILLER INSTINCTS Part 3: The Paggiano Crime Family

For this segment of the series, I've decided to look at the Paggiano crime family (and one of their named henchmen). I'll save the guns used by their nameless gunsels and other firearms that crop up in the book for Part 4.

Julian

SIG Sauer P228 9mm Automatic

An assassin hired by the Paggiano family, Julian is a sleek, stylish, and sophisticated operator, and I wanted to give him a cool-looking handgun to go with his image. While I'm not that big a fan of the SIG series of pistols myself, they are a well regarded family of firearms, and the SIG P228 is a well-made, compact 9mm automatic that's a good counterpoint to something like the Glock 19.









John Paggiano

AKS-74U 5.45x39mm Assault Rifle

 John appears in the final climactic battle of the novel with a "short-barreled AK-style assault rifle". In my mind, the weapon he carried was an AKS-74U. Basically a shortened AK-74 assault rifle with a folding stock, this would be a brutal close-quarters firefight weapon, definitely out-classing an Uzi firing subsonic ammunition.









Mary Paggiano

SIG Sauer P232 .380 Automatic

On the other hand, John's wife, Mary, has a much more subdued weapon - the SIG P232 automatic. Again, a very sleek, well made weapon that would work fine as a carry pistol for a woman who has small hands and isn't able to handle a more powerful recoil. 











Adam Paggiano

Ruger GP100 .357 Magnum Revolver

I don't think it was intended for Adam, John and Mary's teenaged son, to wind up with this Ruger GP100 hand-cannon. However, he gets his hands on one during the final battle. I've fired a Ruger Speed Six in .38, but not this larger handgun. I've always admired the Ruger revolver line, especially the Security Six and Super Redhawk, and I think they often go ignored by people who lean towards Smith & Wesson or Colt. 






Dominic Paggiano

Star S Series .380 Automatic

An old man in his 70's, who probably hasn't had to shoot anyone in a few decades since he's been the head of the family, Dominic has this vintage Star S .380 ACP in his bedstand more for sentimental value. Still, regardless of his age (or the gun's age), Dominic doesn't have any reservations about using it...