Tag: Action Hero

Review: Louisiana Firestorm

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Black Berets: Louisiana Firestorm

The Black Berets series was a range of now obscure 1980s men’s adventure novels. My first exposure to it was in Louisiana Firestorm, the fifth installment. I found it a sad disappointment. For an action novel series, there really wasn’t that much action, and what there was wasn’t that well written.

These are the perils of a quantity based series that has every book being short. It should come as no surprise that the listed author, “Mike McCray”, was actually two separate people sharing the pen name. One of those people, Michael McDowell, was also someone whose work included screenwriting for the movie Beetlejuice (!). Ultra-cheap thrillers seem to attract the weirdest array of people.

Unfortunately, McDowell’s presence in this series is far more interesting than anything in Louisiana Firestorm itself. You make as many shots as a quickie, throwaway mens adventure series does, and you’re bound to have a lot more misses than hits.

Review: Shanghaied on the Rio Grande

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Shanghaied on the Rio Grande: A Novel of World War Three

Just looking at the suffix of this book made me go “I had to review this.” Granted, William Joiner’s Shanghaied on the Rio Grande is more like a short story. But it’s still a World War III invasion story. I thought the length of this would mean there was some kind of publishing mistake or the story was unfinished, but no. It’s wrapped up within its few pages.

This reads like a teenager with little knowledge of the military or geopolitics who read far too many 1980s adventure novels writing a fanfic of those. I do not mean this in a negative term. The Chinese seize control of the American nuclear arsenal and walk in, dominating and trying to force Americans to become Buddhists (seriously). Opposing them are heroic Texans, one of whom is named Billy Bob (also, seriously). The story wraps up incredibly quickly (as in two pages) once the Americans get their nukes back and rout the Chinese.

Is this stupid and offensive to Texans and Chinese alike? Yes. But is it fun? Also yes.

Review: Dead In Their Tracks

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Dead In Their Tracks

After the arduous effort of writing a book, you sometimes need to relax with a nice simple 51% novel. And JT Sawyer’s Dead In Their Tracks fit the bill nicely. The plot is the usual cheap thriller fare. The action is nothing to write home about, though I will say the book is very lean and moves very quickly and nicely.

Still, it’s like potato chips. But sometimes potato chips are what you need. I had fun and that’s what matters. Not every book can be deep, and not every book should be.

A Thousand Words: Iron Eagle II

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Iron Eagle II

The budding Iron Eagle franchise was walloped by two things. The first was actor Jason Gedrick, who played Doug Masters, being occupied with the movie Rooftops, forcing his character to be killed off. Ask Alien fans how they feel about star characters being unceremoniously disposed of. So there was one misstep.

The second was glasnost. “Teaming up with the Soviets against a Middle Eastern petty dictatorship” doesn’t have the same appeal as fighting them. And if Mirages/Kfirs as “MiGs” are questionable, F-4 Phantoms as “MiGs” are downright laughable, being a far better known and far more distinctive shape. The plot is similar to the much later Top Gun: Maverick, in that a vague opponent has a nuclear facility that needs to be blown up, and then things blow up. However, that MacGuffin is common enough that I can believe it as just a legit coincidence.

For all the stumbling, this movie still has explosions, and is cheesy to a degree that makes the first look like a serious art film drama in comparison. Come for the terrible accents, stay for the “BMP” that’s an M113 vismod on the level of the costumes on dogs in The Killer Shrews. It’s not art, but you probably weren’t expecting a movie called Iron Eagle II to be art. It is extremely stupid fun.

A Thousand Words: Cave Dwellers

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Cave Dwellers

Officially, this was the second movie in the Ator series of Conan the Barbarian knock offs. But it’s as “Cave Dwellers” that it leapt into my heart as the greatest Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode I have watched. The small and sus company known as Film Ventures International took a questionable strategy of getting the rights to show clips from movies, changing the titles and credits, then calling the rest of the movie a “clip” for legal reasons. It only worked because they were small.

Anyway, the film started with an extremely blurry clip from a 1960s Italian Tarzan knockoff in its bootleg credits, and then only got crazier from there, following up with an action-packed climax featuring a hang glider and concluding with nuclear bomb footage(!). Joel and the robots excelled, especially because this is the kind of mock where the movie itself has enough great material to build on (for instance, it’s hard to do that much with a stilted, no-budget 50s movie).

Yeah. This is my favorite Mystery Science Theater episode of all time. It’s amazing, and the movie it’s mocking is amazingly bad.

Review: Infiltrated

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I recently finished Infiltrated, the latest (as of this post) entry in the Duncan Hunter series by Mark Hewitt. I was extremely relieved to be done with it, having gone ahead with the final two books out of plain curiosity. It probably was not the wisest decision out there.

By now the main character is an internet Navy SEAL meme done unironically. The set pieces are reduced to the same old superplane gimmick that’s already been repeated many times over. But those are small problems compared to the absolute biggest sign of devolution: The series has become more than ever like William W. Johnstone.

Like Johnstone, the final two books have been taken over more and more by repetitive political rants. They reach a particular low in Infiltrated, not helped by a change in tone. The conspiracies go from “The Hindenburg was destroyed by communists and Amelia Earhart kidnapped by a Soviet submarine and sold into slavery in the Middle East” to boring, annoying, and slightly creepy internet conspiracy theories turned real. It’s like going from “Actually, JFK was killed by a combination of Jackie and the car’s driver” to someone going on tirade after tirade on the “international bankers”.

So yeah, I’m glad to be finished. It was a fun ride for a few books, but overstayed its welcome without a good stopping point.

Review: Wet Work

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Wet Work

Mark Hewitt’s Hunter series continues its crazy in Wet Work, the fifth installment. It gets harder to review a later book in a long series unless the quality changes massively in either direction. This is not the case here. Like most of its predecessors, it’s a sprawling technothriller with a ridiculous main character who makes John Rourke look like an everyman in comparison.

Thankfully, one thing about this book is different and better. The final action set piece is actually tense and well written. But even that can’t break it out of the pack of “I love reading them, but don’t really recommend them for other people” that the first four established.

Review: Blown Cover

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Blown Cover

The fourth book in Mark Hewitt’s Hunter series, Blown Cover is a book where I did not want the crazy to stop. The crazy was the entire point of the series, and for it to become just another middling thriller would be taking the “Captain Beefheart Playing Normal Music” issue to extremes. Thankfully, the crazy becomes, if anything, even crazier.

There’s Amelia Earhart conspiracies, Hindenburg conspiracies, the same conspiracies in the last three books, and more. And this book even has a -shock- actually well written action set piece. There’s a genuinely effective action scene where the protagonist has to struggle his way to the cockpit in a depressurizing plane that’s truly well written. Yes, there’s hundreds of pages of clunky crazy surrounding it, but still.

So yes, I had genuine fun with this book. It might even be my favorite so far in the series, just because of how excessive it is. I like excessive cheap thrillers.

Review: No Need to Know

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No Need to Know

The third in Hewitt’s Hunter series, No Need to Know is every bit as out-there as the first two (if not more). Once again, I’m in the somewhat unusual position of not recommending them for other people while having a blast reading them myself. The conspiracies don’t stop in this book, and neither do the set-pieces.

In fact, this is actually better paced if anything than the second and especially the first book. While it’s still overly long, it feels like it flows better and doesn’t have that many outright dull moments. Ok, except those involving the details of operation the YO-3 airplane, which is obsessed over throughout the series.)

That sounds like faint praise. And the inherent flaws of the first two are still there. But still it’s nice to see an author’s craft get genuinely better.