Trained To Kill (1989)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

the audience applauded

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Ed Cooper (Connors) is a former Vietnam vet who had a son many years ago with a Cambodian woman. Now, Sam (Eaton) has come home to the Cooper family in Los Angeles. He's welcomed to the U.S.A. by the Coopers' biological son Matt (Zagarino), family friend Cotton (O'Neal) and Matt's girlfriend Jessie (Aliff of Damned River fame). However, spoiling all this newfound family bliss is a gang of baddies, the head of which is the slick Ace Duran (Silva). Dispatching his best heavies, Felix (Teague), Loc Syn (Diamond), and Majyk (Z'Dar) to the Cooper household after breaking out of prison, they aim to get revenge on Ed for putting them behind bars. They were running heroin back from Vietnam, and Cooper simply reported them. After getting attacking Ed and Martha (Golonka) Cooper, Sam, Matt, Cotton and Jessie decide to forgo the police and get revenge themselves. Will they do it? Mindless, nonsensical and brain-numbing, Trained To Kill gives new meaning to the word "stupid" - and we mean that in a good way! Fan favorite and personal hero Chuck Connors is back once again with his Brooklyn Dodgers jacket, and thankfully this is Frank Zags' least annoying major role that we've seen to date. There's a triumphant training sequence, Eaton puts in a lot of much-needed energy, and it features Robert Z'Dar with a flamethrower. His name in the movie, Majyk (pronounced as "Magic") isn't the most intimidating name for a bad guy, however. There's the prerequisite torture, and Harold Diamond is a top-notch meathead.The fact that the movie starts in Cambodia with some guy with the most obvious piece of cotton glued to his chin as some sort of facial hair, then moves to the U.S. with Chuck Connors as a guy who takes in foster children and decorates his home solely with travel posters should give you a hint of the ridiculous nature of this movie. Ron O'Neal gets into a swordfight, there's at least one exploding helicopter, and Frank Zagarino sets a new standard in ripped shirt technology by the end of the film. This is a movie that, by all rights, SHOULD have been simply shelf-filler, but, by its sheer silliness, rises above its station to become an entertaining movie.Released on VHS by Malofilm, a company we're not familiar with, on EP mode, the quality is not the best. But if you ever see Trained To Kill anywhere, pick it up. For the star-power alone, it's worth having.

This movie promised "200 % Total ACTION" on the cover of the cassette, but it sorely lacked about 104% of it...It begins with a ridiculous rescue-mission in Cambodia where a chopper is saving a young man (who tries to look like mini-Rambo), he is followed by another young man very poorly disguised as an old guy, his beard is clearly fake and he has no wrinkles at all.. the helicopter then saves the kid, and somebody kills all the enemies (without hitting them), very weird...it only goes downhill from there on..The best things in this movie were Harold Diamond as the mentally disturbed war-veteran Loc Syn, who kind of looks like wrestling legend "The Undertaker", which was pretty cool.Henry Silva was very good as Ace Duran, the evil bad guy who wants revenge or something..I didn't quite get the plot, because it seemed so stupid at the beginning.. but he is good as always, fun to see him in non-Italian movies!Marshall R. Teague as Felix Brenner and Robert Z'Dar as Walter Majyk were also quite fun to watch, because they're so aggressive all the time and stupid-looking.. Majyk's death was specifically stupid, since he was driving a car, and one of the good guy's (the one looking like a clone between Dolph Lundgren and Jake Busey) throws a hand-grenade in it, and he has AT LEAST 15 seconds (seemed like a minute) to either grab the grenade and throw it out, or stop the car and run away, but instead he fumbles with it, looses it under the seat and drives in a ditch where the car explodes.. what an idiot! Made me laugh though.I liked the small cameo by Kane Hodder (known as 'Jason Vorhees' from the 'Friday the 13th'-series) too, he didn't get much screen-time or speaking lines in it, maybe it was because he was just getting started in acting back then.. All in all, I give this movie 7/10 stars.I've seen episodes of "The A-Team" more exiting than this, and I didn't really care for the good guys, they were too boring and humorless, even though they tried hard enough.. I liked the flamethrower-bit, that was good. And all Hail Bunki Z! He saved the movie! And Loc Syn jumping off a railing in a casino down on a players table several feet below him, and not even caring about it after wards! And there was also a poor mans Tom Selleck (from 'Magnum P.I.') in ultra-tight short-shorts running around the casino, made me laugh..! Good body-count in this movie too.