"Fatal Pursuit" opens with some unconvincing violent scenes, with punches that sound like a cushion being whacked with a ping pong paddle, and someone getting their hand off and burnt alive.
B-movie stalwart Robert Z'Dar (he of the huge face) appears wearing a wig that makes him look like a housewife on steroids.
Malcolm McDowell, whose presence in a movie at this stage of his career was certainly no mark of quality, makes an appearance, and so does Charles Napier.
The movie is set in New Orleans. Shannon Whirry plays some kind of career woman who is there investigating something or other. She meets a private eye played by Charles Napier and his coworker, a leisure-suit-Larry type.
You get the feeling the movie wants you to like the mullet-headed, moustachioed, leisure suit guy, which is funny, because he's so sleazy you recall from him. In one scene Shannon gets drunk and he takes her back to her hotel room. Probably nobody in the audience would not be wondering if sexual assault isn't on the cards. And yet, the scene is light-hearted.
Shannon comes to naked, and assumes she has indeed been raped. She gets a little cross with her sleazoid partner, but then they're friends again pretty soon. You'd think he showed her he can fart the national anthem or something, not that he made her the victim of a hideous violation.
You realise about half way through the movie that McDowell is the bad guy. They should have established that better, but the movie's opening scenes, with its unrealistic punches, hands getting lopped off, gunshot wounds, spontaneous combustion and exploding cars, were just too confusing for me to be able to tell what was going on.
Ferret-face himself, Larry Linville, shows up as a guy who can apparently afford a really babin' prostitute with a killer rack, though the filmmakers are dumb enough to not turn the lights on in the scene where she takes her top off.
I've said it already, but it bears repeating: this movie has perhaps the least realistic fisticuffs I've ever seen in a movie. The sound effects are particularly bad, so over the top that they make you realise the people in the scenes can hardly be considered to have struck each other. They look like they're wiping tears off each other's faces with their fists.
Shannon Whirry surprisingly only gets naked twice, with a long lull in between scenes.
I still found myself enjoying "Fatal Pursuit". It may not be a good movie by any measure, but it was still pretty entertaining.
