L.A. Heat

L. A Heat. (1988) Joseph Merhi.

PM Entertainment's low-budget, bullet-shredded, late 80s shoot 'em up, L. A Heat is greatly elevated by the charismatic presence of big Jim Brown. LA Cops go hard after a violently gunhappy drug dealer which affords bargain bucket action impresario Merhi plentiful opportunities for softboiled B-Movie badinage and righteous amounts of slo-mo squibage! The skeezy downtown L. A setting is grungily atmospheric, and there's a boisterously old school Blaxsploitation vibe throughout that I really dug. Straight-shooting detective Lt. Chance (Lawrence Hilton Jacob ) is a tough, likeable good guy, and psycho copkiller Clarence ( Kevin Benton ) makes for a convincingly malign street thug.

I saw this movie on one of the cable channels today...don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of 80's culture and movies. But this was absolutely the most horrid, cheesy, poorly acted, disgrace of a film I have ever witnessed. As I watched it, I felt myself cringing at almost every aspect of the film.

Every actor looked as though they had no experience. The sets were cheesy. The music was awful.

If I could have rated it a "0", I would have. Just terrible.

There is a reason that you have seen almost no one from this film in anything of consequence...it is because having taken part in it probably stained their career forever. If you are ever bored and find yourself entered in a "Find the worst film ever made" contest, do yourself a favor and check this one out. You will not be disappointed in its failures.

Oof! Check out the norks on this crapfest! This early PM film suffers from some of the worst editing I've ever laid my eyes on…which of course just adds to the enjoyment.

Some cop guy who dreams he's a cowboy is after a drug dealer who just loves killing cops. This dealer guy then gets kidnapped by another guy while the mafia are trying to waste everyone involved in the drug deal as dead cops are bad news. Meanwhile, back at the cop shop, big Jim Brown is on the cop's case due to the aforementioned dead cops (mostly this guy's partners), and there's some business about the guy's wife and maybe kids. I can't remember even though I just watched it last night.

What will really grab your attention is how half-arsed this film is. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of second takes. The story kind of lurches along, and the cowboy thing is just another layer in the crap-cake this film is. The best bit is either that terrible editing (people starting lines in one shot only to start them again in another), or the constant shouts of 'cut' and stage direction from the man in charge. I'm no editor by trade by I have edited short films together – it's not hard to cut out that stuff or even add on a new audio channel. Weird man.

This is one of those truly bad films that litter the late eighties and early nineties, and there's loads of them about! Fearless Tiger! Shotgun! Anything Godfrey Ho made!

This film either gets one star based on objective merit, or ten stars on how well it infringes on the rarefied thin air of Ed Woodish pretensions to greatness. I mean, I think it tried to be good. Everybody seemed pretty earnest. But what a POS.

I saw this movie a while back, but just saw it again on Action Channel. Missed the classic beginning chase. Comments follow on what I did catch this time around...

This movie is like a lesson on how not to make a movie. Major points of incompetence...

EDITING: Typical scene starts off with a coffee pot on a kitchen counter. Girlfriend walks into scene, gets a mug and glass from the cupboard, pours a coffee, then opens fridge to fill glass with orange juice, then walks out of frame. Empty kitchen. Continuous shot, static camera. What's the point? Why did we have to see this? For real, I was actually starting to fall asleep.

Over and over we see an empty room, characters walk in, barely ever a cutaway during conversation (and usually to a person not speaking???), then characters leave, and we see an empty room again. Why? About eight consolidated minutes of empty room shots. What the hell.

CINEMATOGRAPHY: There's this scene where Jacobs sneaks up on his girlfriend on the couch. Lazy ass director/DP never moves the camera. So the whole time the girl is talking to Jacobs, you only see the side/back of her head via this wacky low-angle shot that is dominated by a couch...the bottom part of the couch. In another scene where this mobster is talking to his girlfriend (just before he kills her!), there are weird stick-like shadows all over his face. Didn't anyone notice this during filming?

AUDIO: Frankly, I never clearly heard the director comments others have noted because he was drowned out by other ambient noise. Noises like feet shuffling, traffic, airplanes flying overhead. Makes you really appreciate the sound design on auto dealership commercials, etc., where you hear the talent and only the talent.

ACTION SEQUENCES: Hard to believe this film is a contemporary of Hard Boiled. In one ambush scene, three killers with M-16's and Uzis fire a total of five shots, sequentially, of course. One of the bloodpacks doesn't blow, so you just see this wad of white fabric explode out of one victim's shirt. Just before they're shot, all the actors look like you do when you're going to pop a balloon, stiff and all, cus you know the bang is coming. One of the urban gangster killers then actually slings his M-16 before hopping off the backyard deck. Surreal.

WRITING: There are too many inexplicable nonsense scenes, like when the urban gangster punks bust into the cop's house and play darts with the lights off. Huh? Was ist das? It's like, wow, maybe i did fall asleep because this stuff is so complex. I don't understand!

Actual dialogue sample from another scene: "I'm gonna cut you, man!"

Eh, all the rest is on a similar level. The actors seemed into it, as if they cared, but the performances were bad. I guess you gotta lay that on the director. So there: horrible, lazy DIRECTION. As actors, only Jacobs seemed to mail it in, but I think he was trying to play his character just a bit too cool, so it just seemed like he was sleepwalking. His name is in the end credits like six times, so he must've made an effort.

After watching this, you will want to buy a handycam just to prove anybody off the street could do better. And, yes, you would.

Ill keep this short; writing about stuff like this really makes me realise to what extent the English language is limited.

From concept to post-production, this film is flawless. The direction and, specifically, the editing of the piece show years of creative experience in the field. Laurence Hilton-Jacobs returns to the screen with a proto-naturalistic approach to the portrayal of a broken man living in a world which does not appreciate him. The beauty of this is that it seems to reflect the life of Merhi so far. His unique style when directing his works has not always been accepted by an audience of which the majority are used to much more mainstream, commercial films.

The overall 'feel' of the film is of perfection and finesse. It maintains this finish while keeping its art-house status and evading the glossy overcoat which is becoming more and more popularly associated with the industry in America. Over the years I've familiarised myself with the abstract writing style of Kanganis, and it has become a little habit of mine to expect these little surprises that he has for us with each release. The reflection mentioned above seems to have come about naturally; the troubled mind of Merhi and artistic aptitude of Kanganis come together to bring the film together with a fine-tuned taste, but not pretentiousness, and to end it with such a gritty climax as it does.

Merhi is an overwrought genius whose presentation, when grouped with the textual gold of Kanganis' script and the on screen presence of Hilton-Jacobs of such charm and without antecedence is, frankly, magical.