Director: James Bryan
Cast: Christopher Mitchum, Aldo Ray, Renee Harmon

Even if you don't know many of the intricacies that I know about the movie industry, you probably at least know that with every step of making a movie - conceiving the idea and shaping it, pre-production, the shoot, the post-production work, the marketing, and then the release - it is a lot of hard work. There's so much that has to go right in order to make a movie successful, that just one slight misstep can make everything come crashing down despite all the best efforts done towards the movie. There is the case of the 1969 movie The Italian Job, which starred Michael Caine and Benny Hill. In his autobiography What's It All About?, Caine said when discussing the movie that he considered upon seeing the finished film results that the movie was not only "a good action film", but also "a fun picture aimed at kids of all ages". However, upon release, while the movie did solid business in European theaters, when released to the United States, the movie flopped. Caine went on to say that he thought that the movie's failure in America was probably due to a very misleading American marketing campaign. Although the movie itself had been designed to be accessible to everyone, Paramount Pictures in America designed the movie's poster to showcase a mostly undressed woman sitting with her back facing the camera while in front of a seated gangster who was holding an old-fashioned machine gun. While the movie eventually did over the subsequent years manage to build something of a cult in America, Caine was still bitter after all that time about how Paramount had screwed up its theatrical marketing, going on to say, "After months of hard work, sweat and tears, it can sometimes only take one small mistake like that to screw the whole thing up."

Of course, it's not only bad and misleading poster art that can make a movie fail when it's released to the public. There's another factor can play just as bad of a role - or even greater - than a badly thought-out movie poster. It's something that I have discussed at least once before on this website, but I think it's worth a mention again because I have some additional thoughts to say about the subject. What can make a movie sell well or not sell well can be the actual title of the movie. It's been shown that generic titles that are pretty much interchangeable with other titles of movies in the same genre usually result in the movie not standing out well from the pack. In the action genre, there are titles like Maximum Risk and Hard To Kill that make it hard to differentiate each movie from the other. More unique and colorful titles can certainly help, but you have to remember not to go too overboard. For example, legendary B movie producer Samuel Z. Arkoff once recalled in his memoirs when the equally legendary approached him about the title of a movie he was making under Arkoff's watch. Corman wanted the title of the movie to be The Saga Of The Viking Women And Their Voyage To The Waters Of The Great Sea Serpent. Honest. Naturally, Arkoff was horrified by the suggestion, and eventually convinced Corman to allow the movie to have the snappier title Viking Women And The Sea Serpent. Personally, I agree that the shorter title is much better, being easier to remember while still giving potential ticket buyers a good idea of what would be going on in the movie - unlike so many generic movie titles found in practically every movie genre being mined today by filmmakers.

There are some filmmakers and film studios who do something different altogether. That technique is to have a title that references an earlier and usually very famous movie, or more than one movie for that matter. One outfit that has been doing this for years has been the B-movie studio The Asylum. In the past I reviewed one of their movies - Allan Quatermain And The Temple Of Skulls - which is an example of this, managing to reference two movies with that title, the two movies being Allan Quatermain And The Lost City Of Gold and Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. Other efforts by The Asylum that have rip-off titles include Battle Star Wars, Top Gunner, and The Fast And The Fierce. No doubt you can guess correctly what famous movies the guys at The Asylum are thinking you'll associate with their cheap copies. There is a slight variation to this rip-off technique that doesn't happen very often, this altered technique being to not only reference an earlier movie, but to claim that the cheap wannabe is a sequel to the referenced movie. For example, take the George Romero movie Dawn Of The Dead, which in Italy was renamed Zombi. As soon as that movie started to be a hit on Italian soil, some enterprising Italians (including the legendary director Lucio Fulci) made their own zombie movie, and they titled it Zombi 2 (which was renamed simply Zombie when it came to America, no doubt in fear of a lawsuit from Romero.) This has happened several other times in Italian cinematic history - for example, there was a "sequel" to Alien, and also at least one "sequel" to The Terminator.

But sometimes supposed rip-off sequels don't do this as directly, which brings up the movie being reviewed here, The Executioner Part II. Some people might think it's a sequel to the 1970 George Peppard movie The Executioner... or a sequel to the 1963 Spanish/Italian The Executioner... or some other past movie that was named The Executioner. But that isn't the case. It's also has no connection to the very popular The Executioner pulp novel series by author Don Pendleton. Instead, this title seems to have been chosen so that dim-witted moviegoers might think it was a sequel to the notorious 1980 grindhouse movie with a similar title, The Exterminator, which four years earlier had been a huge box office smash. I have to admit that though I saw through the scheme of the people behind The Executioner Part II, such utter chutzpah and gall made me curious enough to sit down and watch it from start to end. The first few seconds of The Executioner Part II start with a display of the title. That's it - no background music or any other credits. Right afterwards we cut to a still picture of some tropical location while over it reads the caption "Vietnam 1970". The scene that follows is... well... kind of hard to put together. Although this is supposed to be Vietnam, the American soldiers seen in this scene are running around dodging explosions in a landscape that sure looks like southern California, while overhead is a chopper providing air support. Oddly, this helicopter seems to be the exact style of the McDonnell Douglas helicopter used by the character of T.C. in Magnum P.I. - no Huey military choppers for these tough soldiers! Anyway, the nearest I could piece together is the sergeant of this platoon of soldiers, Roger (Chris Mitchum, One Man Jury) is wounded in the chaos. Some other people writing about this movie say that we hear a voice saying "BANG!" when Roger is shot, but it sure sounded more like "Mike!" to me, namely because then we are introduced to a soldier named Mike (John Mottet, Bruce Lee's Dragons Fight Back) who risks it all to get to Roger's side, pick him up, and bring him to the chopper so that Roger can be taken for medical treatment - despite the fact that it's clearly seen there would be no room for him in the limited space inside that McDonnell Douglas helicopter.

The scene dissolves and brings us to the present day, in what appears to be Los Angeles. Make that "present night", because the sun is down while Roger - now a police detective - is investigating a roped-off crime scene. What crime happened? Who was involved? We don't know while Roger finds a wooden match on the ground, picks it up with his bare hands, and looks at it. Well, this was before DNA testing. From out of nowhere, a television reporter named Celia (Renee Harmon, Van Nuys Blvd.) pops into the crime scene with her trusty cameraman. Seeing Roger, she goes to him and starts grilling him. From her we find out that the crime was a murder (who?), and she asks him if it's the work of "The Executioner", who has been rumored to have been on a vigilante spree for the past few weeks. Roger brushes her off, no doubt not wanting to spread too much information at this point to the public, but maybe also because Celia has a European accent so thick that it's hard to believe she was hired as a TV reporter in Los Angeles. We then move to the next day, where we see three louts entering the rooftop of a building, carrying a nubile woman apparently against her will despite her only feebly struggling. As they prepare to rape her, an elderly couple from across the street see the sight and mutter, "Oh, come and look. Oh, what are they doing to her?" The louts then start to extremely slowly tear up the woman's clothes, and from approximately here to the end of the scene, suddenly a fourth lout has appeared out of nowhere. While we are trying to figure that out, from out of nowhere a black-hooded figure with a gun appears in the building and climbs the stairs to the roof. How did he know to be there at that moment? While we are trying to figure that out as well, he reaches the roof, and with a few pistol whips (because this movie is too cheap to use blanks), he scares off all the louts except for one that he knocks unconscious. In a gruff voice, the hooded figure exclaims, "I'm your judge, I'm your jury, I'm your executioner!" He then pulls out a grenade and straps it on the face of the unconscious lout. Cut to stock footage of an explosion that looks nothing like how the explosion would look in real life.

Some time later, over footage of Los Angeles, we hear another news reporter saying out loud, "Police still have no idea who The Executioner is, and they don't wanna talk about it." Journalistic standards were crumbling even back then. Then we are taken to an auto garage somewhere in the area, where a mobster named Casallas (Frisco Estes) arrives being driven by his chauffeur not in a limousine, but a much less spectacular vehicle. Mike, the owner of the garage goes up to Casallas to try and get him to pay the $64 bill for work he did for Casallas. Casallas refuses to pay, gets back into his car, and he and his driver leave. Do mobsters in real life really like to take the time to go to people they owe money to and tell them they won't pay, doing nothing else during their visit? Anyway, during the subsequent drive away, Casallas tells his chauffeur he wants "a chick". Casallas' driver tells him it's hard nowadays because not only is The Executioner scaring the pimps, the ladies working for the pimps are afraid of what they nickname "The Tattoo Man". The person they are talking about is Casallas himself. Where are his tattoos? Don't a lot of criminals and gangsters have tattoos so that the nickname "The Tattoo Man" would not be a clear identifier? Even Casallas seems confused by this nickname. (Late in the movie, he does reveal three small tattoos, all of which look painted on.) Then we cut to Mike and Roger, with Mike working on tuning up Roger's car. The subject of Roger's daughter Laura (Bianca Philippi) is brought up during the tuning up while both men are drinking beers. Then suddenly, with their cans of beer still in their hands, Mike says to Roger, "Let's you and me go and get a beer." Suddenly, they hear several car thieves outside stealing the tires of a car. Both men jump into action to battle the thieves in a scene consisting of not only extremely poor fight choreography, but that every punch, kick, and body blows with weapons uses the exact same sound effect when there's an impact.

We then cut to two young women (one of them the aforementioned Laura) exiting some post-secondary institute, discussing how "dumb" math is. There must then be a lot of math in this movie at some point. Laura departs from her friend and walks down an alley where we can see an RV parked a short distance away. Before she gets to where the RV is, she meets a sleazy guy she calls Vance (Frank Albert). It soon becomes clear that Vance is a drug dealing pimp, who refuses to give the woman any drugs until she pays up. Laura doesn't have the money, and when Vance gives her an offer to pay by working for him (guess how) she refuses and storms off, and when she leaves, we see that the RV has suddenly disappeared. A few seconds later, Casallas and his driver pull up, and Casallas addresses Vance as "Pete". Huh? (Note: the character much later in the movie has his full name revealed as "Pete Vance". But why confuse the audience for a time with his name?) Anyway, Casallas tells Vance/Pete that he needs a woman. We cut to Roger at work on the phone with the commissioner assuring him that they are doing everything possible to find The Executioner. Celia enters as the phone call ends, and Roger says he saw her recent newscast. Then abruptly, we cut to a bar where Casallas is talking to a person just referred to as "Mr. Eastbrook" (Bruce Barrington, Mr. Mom). During their conversation, we get that Eastbrook represents a very important politician, and it's important that no tie is ever exposed regarding the politician's association with Casallas. Then all of a sudden, the two men are visited by the police commissioner, played by the legendary Aldo Ray (Hollywood Cop). Ray's face in this scene is shown in complete close-up when he appears, making it clear that he filmed his close-up at another time and another place. What really makes it clear is that the double for Ray seen when the commissioner character has his back to the camera is wearing glasses while close-up Ray is clearly not.

Then we cut back to Roger talking with Celia. Celia tells Roger, "You need all the help you can get, and I can provide, hmm, some." She explains that sometimes people who won't talk to the police will talk to news reporters, and that idea intrigues Roger. Before we get his answer, we cut away again, this time to another band of no-good punks. What makes these punks especially no good is that when they see a bag lady pushing a shopping cart full of cardboard in an alley, they not only push over her shopping cart, swipe a photograph (of who? It's never made clear) from her purse and rip it in half, they also steal a dollar from her purse! That must have been a lot of money back in 1984, because as the punks are walking away from the bag lady, they get into a struggle with each other as to who will claim the dollar. They subsequently go to a mini mart, where they deposit the dollar at the Jerry's Kids contribution jar that's on the cashier counter. Just kidding - all the punks proceed to trash the mini mart, punch one of the employees several times (again, the punches all sound the same), and knife him and a female employee, bloodying them up. As the punks leave, the dying male employee cries out for the police, which irks one of the punks so much that he turns around to finish off his victim. But then The Executioner appears in full costume and mask, and once again doesn't even have any blanks in the gun he uses to pistol whip the punk into unconsciousness. ("A**hole bastard!" he spits at the punk.) The Executioner then drags the unconscious punk to a safe area where he proceeds to drop a grenade down the punk's pants' leg. There is an explosion - the same explosion footage that we saw used earlier in the movie.

Up to this point, which is about a third into the movie, The Executioner Part II proves itself to have a lot of pure unintentional comedy gold. The remaining two-thirds of the movie do uncover more of this glitzy stuff along the way. I don't want to spoil everything that comes up, but I feel to properly give readers a good idea of the staggering ineptness to be found in the movie, I should tell a little more. The story continues at this point to be really dumb - examples include cop Roger never having heard before of Casallas, a.k.a. "The Tattoo Man" despite this guy being a leading local mobster, it's never really explained how Roger eventually gets the idea that Mike might be The Executioner, or why one of Casallas' goons breaks into Mike's garage at one point. It's also strange that there isn't as much footage focusing on The Executioner as you might think, with the movie focusing a lot instead of the pretty useless subplot about Laura seeking drugs and getting mixed up with Vance. It doesn't help that the way all the plot elements unfold are often in a protracted garbled manner, with scenes starting up and then abruptly ending, and the movie forces some characters to make extremely idiotic decisions so that the running time can be extended. The cast, by the way, understandably can't seem to sell these stupid characters, ending up giving bad performances, especially Mottet, who takes the deranged Vietnam vet stereotype to new extremes. (Ray, if you are wondering, seems equally confused in his two additional scenes that too were clearly filmed with none of the other actors in the movie.) To be fair to the cast, they are clearly and frequently dubbed over with voices that simply don't fit with what their characters are experiencing at a particular moment. The movie's low rent nature extends to mostly shooting in back alleys and abandoned buildings, poor fight or vehicle choreography, and one more use of that same explosion we saw twice before earlier. Reading over what I've written so far in this paragraph, it would be understandable to think that the movie then is an unintentional laugh riot from start to end. Actually, while the movie is laugh out loud funny in the first third, from that point on the movie has a great pathetic nature that kind of stops you from laughing so much. The movie is so cheap, so amateurish, that you start to get a little embarrassed. But while this often holds back laughter, you will always at least have a smile on your face. The movie definitely entertains, albeit in an unintentionally way. It's a shame the filmmakers never made a sequel. Well, I guess they did, but you know what I mean.

(Posted December 14, 2025)