Director: Jerome Gary
Cast: Shadoe Stevens, Prisilla Barnes, Willard E. Pugh, Robert Davi

Over the years, I've spent a significant amount of time wondering about the occupations of certain people. What I often wonder about is how did an individual in a certain career field got the ambition and interest that made him or her focused on getting a job in that career field. For example, what is so great about teeth? I don't think that teeth are all that interesting, yet just a quick look around your city will no doubt uncover a number of dentists and orthodontists that have set up shop. You could say the same thing about proctologists and urologists - what's the interest in getting into gross subject matter? There is one certain type of job that I most often find myself thinking about, and that is with mercenary work. How does someone transform over the years from a child that likes Legos and puppies to a full-grown adult who kills people for a living? Having thought that question through, I have concluded that it's a hard question to answer, given that the past circumstances are different for every mercenary. But there are some turning points in the pasts of the mercenaries that do seem to pop up often. Many mercenaries got the first spark for their future career by entering the armed forces of the country they are in. After being fully trained by the armed forces for several years, they seem to get a taste of armed warrior life, especially if they have seen combat during their stint and got away unscathed. Once being discharged from the military, whether their penchant for further combat seems lucrative or has become an obsession, they then drift into the world of mercenary life.

After thinking about what many mercenaries must go through in order to have the mindset to be someone who kills for money or some other kind of personal gain (maybe just for the thrill of the hunt and kill), I sometimes wonder what these mercenaries are like during their private time. How do they treat other people? Even though they have chosen mercenary work to be their prime occupation, do they have the dream to do something else, such as a hobby? Those are tough questions to answer. I remember once reading an interview with writer Don Pendleton, who created the pulp action book series The Executioner. Despite the title character being someone who was obsessed with tracking down and killing various members of the mafia before The Punisher blatantly ripped him off, Pendleton told the interviewer that the title figure (a.k.a. Mack Bolan) was someone you would be very comfortable with being in your home. Though from what I remember when I read some of the books as a teenager, Bolan seemed very humorless, obsessed, and on the rare times he took a vacation, he always seemed to end up in an extremely violent struggle. So you may understand why at times I find it difficult to imagine some kind of mercenary in his private time indulging in something benign in nature. But I guess it could be possible. I've heard of some tough people in some tough professions doing unusual activities on their down time. There are some football players who in an attempt to relax indulge in needlework. Also, I know some other football players take ballet lessons as a way to train their bodies to be more comfortable when they are out in the field.

Yes, I know that what I just said in the above paragraph about football players probably got you giggling. For what seems like forever, the idea of a tough person (mercenary or not) doing something not so tough often provokes laughter. With this in mind, I could understand why the makers of Traxx had the movie's mercenary character's hobby not only treated humorously, but with the rest of the movie attempting to be humorous as well. I understood this when I first saw the movie as a teenager in the 1980s. At the time, my mother and I were big fans of the TV game show Hollywood Squares, which featured radio DJ Shadoe Stevens as a big part of the show. When my mother and I learned that Stevens had been in a movie, my mother a few days later went to a local video store to rent it for us to watch. At the time, I though it was one of the most unfunniest and imcompetent comedies I'd ever seen. But many years later, I found a copy of the movie in a thrift store, and decided to give it another chance. Some things do improve with age, after all. In the movie, Stevens plays the title character, a Texas police officer who loves to kill criminal scum who might get away with crimes if arrested and brought to court. His superiors don't think too kindly of Traxx's modus operandi, and they fire him. In need of money, Traxx then spends the next few years acting as a mercenary in foreign lands. Traxx eventually tires of this, and he wants to indulge in his dream of making and selling his own brand of cookies. Naturally, he knows he'll need a lot of money to start his business venture, so he returns to Texas and finds a small town that is under the thumb of mobster Aldo Palucci (Robert Davi, License To Kill). Traxx arranges with the town's mayor (Priscilla Barnes, Jane The Virgin) and local police chief (John Hancock, Collision Course) that he'll clean up the town for a substantial fee. Traxx gets assistance from a street hustler named Deeter (Willard E. Pugh, Spoiler), and the two of them start destroying Palucci's criminal enterprise. Palucci is naturally upset by this, and eventually starts to make plans for Traxx and Deeter to be wiped out.

Traxx was a production of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, which in the late 1980s started to theatrically distribute their own movies instead of giving them to outside distributors. However, Traxx (like the aforementioned DEG movie Collision Course) never got a theatrical release, probably because of the severe financial problems the company was having at the time of its completion, soon afterwards going bankrupt. No other theatrical distributor seemed interested to pick up the theatrical rights to Traxx, and it's almost certainly because, also like Collision Course, Traxx is a really bad action-comedy. Possibly you are thinking that part of the reason for that has to be the casting of a non-actor - Stevens - in the lead role... especially if you know that to date this is the only movie Stevens has been in, at least in a lead role. But being given such an opportunity when most professional actors don't even get one in their entire careers oddly didn't make Stevens very enthusiastic, judging by the performance he gives here. Most of the time he gives off a very bored and uninterested vibe, almost as much as Bruce Willis had been putting in his films in the few years before becoming ill. He also lacks the charisma he managed to give off simply by being himself in Hollywood Squares; instead, he's mostly bland. There are a few times when something apparently set off a temporary spark within him, but even in those times he can't handle things. In those moments he comes across as someone trying to be a really intense Dirty Harry while at the same time trying to be hilarious. While simultaneously playing both extremes has been done successfully by others - think of actor David Rasche in the 1980s TV comedy show Sledge Hammer! - it really takes a lot of skill to pull off, and Stevens simply doesn't have the acting chops to get remotely close to doing this.

Seeing Stevens here is sometimes like seeing someone drowning in front of you while your hands are tied - you see him sinking and you feel helpless, that is when you don't feel embarrassed. While drowning, Stevens drags down the rest of the cast with him. While some of the other cast members occasionally show signs of talent (actor Pugh in particular has some charm), they really can't do much when they are paired up in a scene with Stevens... or for that matter when Stevens is not in a particular scene. One of the biggest reasons for that is the terrible screenplay, which does no favors for anyone. The character of Traxx first appears for less than two minutes before he's fired, then we see a couple of minutes of him being a mercenary in various foreign locations, then abruptly is back on U.S. soil with the dream of being a cookie maker. It should come as no surprise that this gives the movie almost no chance to establish this character and make him believable even for this particular warped universe. What made him a shoot-first kind of person? Why does he want to make cookies? Does he have any fears or other ambitions? I know normally in a goofball comedy you're not supposed to think too hard about questions like those, but you'll be asking such questions a lot in Traxx because the character isn't any more than a very thin caricature at best. Needless to say, the other characters in this movie are also pretty weak, but rather than being redundant by telling just how exactly, I want to instead point out another incredibly big weakness in the screenplay. There are many things that just don't make any sense. Why show Traxx acting as a mercenary if he just returns to his home turf being just as trigger happy and hotheaded as he was when he was fired as a cop? Why does Traxx decide to choose the person to be his sidekick by picking the first person he sees? Why does the local newspaper headline state vigilante Traxx is "...Still Kicking Butt" when Traxx has just been on a vigilante crusade for only one night? (Well, the newspaper could have been referring to Traxx's violent policeman past... but wouldn't it be better for the newspaper after Traxx's long absence to say something instead like, "Traxx Is Back And Still Kicking Butt"?) How is Traxx able to drive his motorbike from the outdoors and then through the glass doors of Palucci's bedroom when a few seconds later we see that Palucci's bedroom was clearly on the second floor of his mansion?

It should then come as no surprise when I state Traxx is equally slipshod in many other parts. The best way to describe the general look and feel of the movie (inside and outside) is for you to imagine the rundown and mostly abandoned industrial area of your city. You've got it. While studio head Dino De Laurentiis seems to have recycled some of the New York City sets originally built in North Carolina for Year Of The Dragon, director Jerome Gary (who never directed any other non-documentary movies) presents them to look as dismal as those aforementioned indoor and outdoor locations. It's obvious that Gary was facing a lot of behind-the-scenes turmoil that didn't just lead to those plot holes I mentioned in the previous paragraph and the real low rent atmosphere. For example, take the scene where Traxx meets the police chief and offers his services. It doesn't take long to see that both actors are never in the same shot - obviously the actors were filmed separately and then edited together to try and make it look they are talking to each other in the same confined space. There are also some real flubs, such as when you can see at the bottom of the screen the metal tracks that the movie camera is being pushed along by the movie crew. Traxx mostly suffers, however, from a real mean-spirited feeling, not just with its bouts of brutal violence, but also as if Gary and everyone else attached to the movie knew they were delivering a third-rate product, and were depending on the stupidity of moviegoers to accept the entire package. I notice I haven't even got into the humor of Traxx, but I don't think it's necessary to get into why I felt it was simply not the least bit funny, unless you think the idea of someone passing gas while seated in a car blowing himself up a few seconds later when he lights his cigar, or the real-life Wally Amos of Famous Amos Cookies throwing up after eating one of Traxx's rancid cookies, are hilarious gags just by thinking about them. (Though if you, for some reason, really want to know more about the movie's extremely desperate unfunniness, click this link to watch the movie's theatrical trailer.) Traxx goes completely off the tracks and becomes a complete train wreck. I fear that by now some readers are very curious about the movie and want to see for themselves how bad it is, but trust me, even bad movie fans won't find anything amusing about its ineptness.

(Posted January 8, 2025)