Broken Angel (1988)

The Worst Film Ever

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Broken Angel is one of those cheap 80s TV movies that are so awesomely lame that you just have to watch the whole thing. The plot is the daughter of William Shatner's character, played by Erika Eleniak, goes missing at the end of a school dance after a gang-related shooting that kills her friend. Shatner and his wife, Susan Blakely, spend the rest of the movie in search of her. They are at first "assisted" by a cop, played by Brock Peters, who is (as is usual for movies like this) actually pretty useless. The true help comes from a woman working for the L.A. Gang Project, a nonprofit to get kids out of gangs, who tells the couple that their daughter is actually a member of a gang herself!There are also a couple side plots too, most notably Shatner's preteen son, who is gay or at least curious, and enjoys trying on his mother's diamond earrings. Of course this side plot doesn't really go anywhere and is not dealt with in any seriousness and could have and probably should have been left out.Another thing this movie has is many lame and unintentionally funny scenes. One of the more comical scenes involves the Chinese gang and the white gang (as it is frequently called in the movie) engaging in a battle of sorts in a children's playground, yielding not guns, not knives, not even chains, but small planks of wood and sticks. Such harsh realism! Another great scene is where Shatner manages to fight off a group of probably 20 members of the Chinese gang (this time armed with small pocket knives) with nothing but a small bag, and then escapes and actually outruns 5 of them.Then, as the search for their daughter continues but hope and leads begin to dwindle, the movie ends. Pretty suddenly, too, in a very anti-climactic way. I won't tell the "surprise," but you don't have to be a genius to figure out that it is going to be predictably happy.In conclusion, both mildly interesting and unintentionally funny, Broken Angel is one really great, super cheesy 80s TV movie that everyone should definitely see!

A film which showcases what was clearly the high water mark in William Shatner's long and illustrious career. The Asian mafia plot line keeps it edgy, while the gay tween issues it softly addresses keeps it real. As a desperate father-cum-vigilante on a quest to solve his daughter's untimely murder,the only thing Chuck (Shatner) changes more often than his sweaters in this nail-biting whodunit are the rules themselves. He must though, as his antagonist turns out to be a lawless, yet colorfully dressed, band of drug smuggling, wanton Asians who will stop at close to nothing (spoiler alert - a heavy sack of shirts knocks them down but not out)to end his trying journey without any one of them going to the jail-house. A lazy-susan of supportive folk surround Chuck, most notably the police chief, who beams with the firmness associated with Morgan Freeman.