The Executioner, Part II (1984) 21st Century Film Corporation/Action RT: 86 minutes Rated R (violence, language, nudity, sexual content including rape, drugs) Director: James Bryan Screenplay: Renee Harmon Music: N/A Cinematography: James Bryan Release date: June 1984 (US) Cast: Christopher Mitchum, Aldo Ray, Antoine John Mottet, Renee Harmon, Dan Bradley, Frank Albert, Bianca Phillipi, Frisco Estes, Ricco Mancini, Marisi Courtwright, Bruce Barrington, Debra Martell, Karen Luce, Cheryl Harmon, Arline Specht, Dennis Mancini, Carla Barbour, Tania Kim, June Mellon, Al Doro, Jerry Rattay, Donna Esser, Belle. Box Office: N/A
Rating: NO STARS!!!
Despite its title, The Executioner, Part II is NOT a sequel. There is no Executioner, Part I. It doesn’t exist, it never did. So why the Roman numeral in the title? That’s pretty obvious. A shameless rip-off of The Exterminator, the makers hurriedly threw it together and got it out there in hopes that audiences might confuse it with Exterminator 2 which came out the same year. I don’t recall it ever playing in cinemas. I might have seen the box on the shelf at the video store. I never watched it until this past weekend. Let me tell you, it makes both Exterminator movies look like Fellini.
The Executioner, Part II is a sorry excuse for a cheap, exploitation movie. It’s bad even by the low, low standards of low-budget B-movies. It’s not only bad, it’s incompetent on every imaginable level as well. It’s incredible in that it doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. It takes a special kind of talent to accomplish such an amazing feat. The credit for that goes to director James Bryan whose resume includes such cinematic gems as Lady Street Fighter (no connection to the Sonny Chiba flicks), Don’t Go in the Woods and Hell Riders (starring Tina Louise and Adam West). This guy must have been following the Edward D. Wood Jr. playbook to the letter. He gets absolutely nothing right. No exaggeration, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Zero, zilch, nada, nimic, niente, nichts and all other applicable words, consult your thesaurus and Google Translate.
To be fair, Bryan didn’t act alone. He had an accomplice, a partner-in-crime if you will. Her name is Renee Harmon and she wrote the horrendous screenplay. She too gets it wrong, wrong, WRONG! All she had to do was come up with a dopey action story about a disturbed Vietnam vet playing vigilante in the mean streets of L.A. It should have been easy, but she somehow manages to f*** it up too. To simply say The Executioner, Part II is poorly written isn’t enough. This is bad writing on a whole different level. She focuses too little on “The Executioner” and too much on the parties (cops and criminals) trying to stop him. It’s supposed to be a vigilante movie; I want to see bad guys being taken out en masse. Who doesn’t? We don’t get nearly enough of that here and when we do, it still sucks. The action scenes are poorly executed with some of the worst fight choreography ever captured on film. When violence can’t even save a cheap action flick, you something’s off, WAY OFF!
Ostensibly, The Executioner, Part II deals with a vigilante, a masked man in Army fatigues who favors blowing up scumbags with grenades. In his first big scene, he stops a gang-rape and beats one of the creeps to a bloody pulp and plants a live grenade on him with these parting words: “I’m your judge, I’m your jury, I’m your executioner!” KA-BOOM!! It’s the only scene in the whole movie that almost works. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. We need to start at the beginning.
The movie opens in Vietnam circa 1970 with a bunch of soldiers engaged in a firefight with the enemy. In the chaos, one soldier saves the life of another. Cut to present day, where we learn “The Executioner” has been making life hell for the LAPD and the criminal underworld. He’s been taking out the trash himself effectively lowering the crime rate and gaining the favor of the public. The cops want him stopped because he’s making them look bad. Crime boss Antonio Casallas (Estes) wants him stopped because he’s cutting into his business interests. So far, so good, right? Keep reading, devoted readers.
Nobody in the movie knows who The Executioner is, not even his best friend Lt. Roger O’Malley (Mitchum, Big Jake), the guy whose life he saved in ‘Nam. To everybody watching, it’s completely obvious from the second we first lay eyes on him. His name is Mike (Mottet), an auto mechanic who doesn’t work on foreign cars or automatic transmissions. Is it any wonder we never see any customers at his garage? Anyway, he’s clearly suffering from PTSD. He displays all the classic symptoms including aiming his rifle at imaginary helicopters in the sky. Is it really a big leap to waging war on thieves, rapists, gang members and drug dealers?
I’m making The Executioner, Part II sound pretty straightforward, but nothing could be further from the truth. It quickly becomes an incoherent collection of scenes that look like they were thrown together at random in a hurry. There’s the barest minimum of connective tissue. We get scenes of O’Malley investigating the case, Antonio trying to conduct business and Mike losing his mind. There’s also a subplot involving O’Malley’s teenage daughter Laura (Phillipi), a drug addict always looking to score. She hardly ever has money, so her dealer suggests turning tricks as a means of raising capital. Her super-annoying best friend Kitty (Courtwright) is all for it; that’s what she does. What naïve Laura doesn’t know is that her dealer/pimp is trying to find a new (underage) girl for his boss, a sadistic creep known on the streets as “The Tattoo Man”. Take a wild guess who the Tattoo Man is? Hint, it’s not O’Malley or Mike.
No movie like The Executioner, Part II would be complete without a tenacious female reporter always showing up at crime scenes trying to get an interview. Here, it’s Celia Amherst and she’s played by none other than Ms. Harmon herself. No surprise, she’s as bad an actress as she is a screenwriter. She speaks with this unidentified foreign accent that begs the question of how she got a job as a TV news reporter to begin with. You can barely understand what she’s saying. That’s not all. Would you believe she becomes romantically involved with O’Malley? Yeah, I thought you would. It happens all the time in these movies with the possible sole exception of Invasion U.S.A. (Chuck never did hook up with Melissa Prophet, you remember).
I usually reserve my “NO STARS!!!” rating for movies that are detestable on some level. While The Executioner, Part II isn’t morally bankrupt (no more than any other vigilante flick really), it is in every other area. I’ve seen amateur home movies that look more professional than this. The editing by Jim Markovic is a mess. At one point, a scene cuts away to a completely unrelated scene in the middle of a conversation and returns to it after the other scene plays out. The sound editing isn’t any better. A car starts before the character turns the ignition key. The dialogue is dubbed and totally out of sync. There are gaffes and continuity errors galore. When Mike hits some random hood with his car, the actor can be seen jumping before the vehicle makes contact. Shots are used and reused like the stock explosion footage every time the Executioner blows somebody up. It’s clear Bryan spared every expense possible making this piece of crap. He shot it all on 35mm short ends and not during the week because it’s cheaper to rent the equipment on weekends. That’s definitely an Ed Wood move.
The acting in The Executioner, Part II is just pitiful. Mitchum might resemble his dad (actor Robert Mitchum) but he doesn’t appear to have inherited any of his acting abilities. He makes Robert Ginty (aka The Exterminator) look like an accomplished thespian. Aldo Ray (We’re No Angels), the only other notable name in the cast, overacts to the skies as a corrupt police commissioner. At least I think he’s corrupt, it’s hard to tell. Estes’ character is a nasty piece of work, but so is every other crime boss in cheapie actioners. The two teen girls talk too much. They’re totally annoying. I cringed every time they opened their mouths. One of them actually says “Oh, heavenly coke!” when discussing their love for illegal narcotics. The actors playing gang members look more like extras in a music video with their bandanas, half-shirts and acid-wash jeans. I kept waiting for the gangs from Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video to come kick their asses. Disappointingly, the Executioner doesn’t kill them all leaving them free to terrorize store owners and bag ladies. What kind of vigilante is this guy anyway?
When I voluntary (as in of my own volition) clicked on The Executioner, Part II on Tubi, I thought it would be cool. There are few things in life better than watching a cheesy exploitation action flick late at night on a Saturday. Many a Saturday night in my teens was spent doing that exact thing, be it a movie showing on cable or one rented from the Video Den (man, I miss that place!). I’ve been racking my brain and I can’t come up with one as truly horrendous as The Executioner, Part II. It’s horrifically, hilariously bad. I don’t think I would have liked it back in the day and keep in mind my standards were significantly lower then. Some bad movies are timeless. They’re terrible no matter when you watch them. You have to see it for yourself to believe it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
