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A monsignor recruits a new priest to his parish in Los Angeles where the newcomer proceeds to turn vigilante and take on various thugs and criminals that rule the neighborhoods.

Hilariously over the top vigilante priest movie....!

Behold the righteously destructive fury of Father Beatdown

The Monsignor (Estrada), Father Thomas (Vincent) and their helpful assistant Merna (Landers) live and work at a church in a &quot;bad part&quot; of L.A. One day, a man named Father Daniel (Foley) comes to join their parish. The only thing about Father Daniel is, he&#39;s a Martial Arts expert who uses his Cross-emblazoned gun, knives and even throwing stars to take out the trash of the city. He even uses the confessional for tips on where to go. But if the parishioners don&#39;t give him enough info, he uses his psychic powers to find out more. While trying to keep his double life secret, he meets a fellow psychic, Kim (Chambers), who he takes a liking to. Meanwhile, there&#39;s a sadistic serial killer stalking the city named Otis (Stroud), who drains his victims of blood and saves their skulls. But Father Daniel saves people&#39;s souls, so the two men are mortal enemies. When Otis kidnaps Kim, the ultimate showdown ensues. Or something like that. You would think a movie about a psychic priest who kills his enemies with throwing stars with the Cross on them would be a surefire hit. But in the hands of director/co-writer Rundle, this one idea is not enough to sustain a 90 minute movie. Thus there is plenty of filler which dilutes this killer idea. A wise man once said &quot;you cannot intentionally make a cult film&quot; and that seems to be the case here. Sure, the movie is loaded up with quality B-movie names, but it could definitely be argued that they are not used to their full potential. Add to that some muddy, muffled sound where the music is louder than the dialogue and a lot of repetitive scenes (such as the oft-repeated &quot;Breakfast&quot; scene) and, far from a unique winner, we&#39;re bordering dangerously on dud. The credits of the movie misspell Erik Estrada&#39;s name (crediting him as &quot;Eric&quot; with a C), while the VHS box (released by Prism) has it correctly. He does more-or-less a &quot;sit-down&quot; role, as does Jan-Michael Vincent, who does an out-and-out sit-down. Vincent just sits at the breakfast table with his newspaper and slurs a few lines. Sure, there&#39;s something endearing about it, but he&#39;s so under-used. And speaking of under-used, Jim Brown and Robert Z&#39;Dar are on screen for literally seconds as incidental drug-dealers. More should have been made of them. Don Stroud plays the deranged killer with aplomb, but his scenes contain the most filler. And who is this Michael Foley, who plays the main role of Father Daniel, you ask? He was in Lionheart (1990), Karate Cop (1991) and Intent To Kill (1992) - but he&#39;s still kind of an odd choice for a leading role. Some of the better moments in The Divine Enforcer comes from the random scenes - plenty of parts have no explanation, and that combined with the amateurish acting usually provides the VHS gold we&#39;re always looking for. But it&#39;s a battle against filler. Ken Davitian shows up in an uncredited role as a club owner watching the singer Hiroko (and her stellar backup dancers) do a performance. Her song &quot;My Love&#39;s Waiting&quot; temporarily livens things up, but this movie is still fairly disappointing. In all, the idea of the Father Daniel character is excellent, but, sadly, the movie as a whole is mishandled, not getting the maximum bang for the buck from the idea.

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The Deadly Avenger

Wow- this was a &quot;good&quot; bad movie, if you get my meaning. It was rather entertaining from start to finish. It&#39;s obviously a very low budget, exploitation movie from the start (girls are falling out of their tops from the first roll of film!), but at least you are rooting for the vigilante! Don Stroud plays a hilariously over the top psycho out to extract blood from his female victims. He ties them up and tortures them, yadda yadda. The hero priest is a somber fellow out to stop crime!! But it takes him the whole movie to finally stop this Don Stroud vampire killer guy. Erik Estrada is classically bad (in a good way, once again), as the Monsignor. The best part of this movie is Jan Michael Vincent&#39;s small role as Father Thomas. JMV gets to irritate Erik Estrada at the breakfast table every morning by reading the paper about the latest killings. JMV has some classic one-liners that make his 5 minutes on screen well worth this whole flick! Too bad he gets killed which making confession!!!! :-)

Watching movies from 10-15 years ago always make them seem &#39;a bit slow&#39; compared to contemporary movies - and this is definitely no exception. 
It somehow reminds me &quot;The Father Dowling Mysteries&quot; with Tom Bosley from &quot;Happy Days&quot; as the plot could be taken directly out of a tv show: A new priest in LA has to stop a &#39;vampire-killer&#39; on the loose (you&#39;d almost think it was a spoof). In fact it would have done better as an episode of some low rated tv-crime series, because as a full length movie it just doesn&#39;t cut it. The story is even supported by an awful soundtrack based on 1970s synthesizer sounds - but this is nothing compared to the acting which is close to appaling. Erik Estrada is so bad that a polar bear only wearing a pair of sunglasses trying to get in to a &#39;penguins only&#39;-golf club would be more convincing. Even &#39;easy&#39; lines such as &quot;What has this world come to&quot; are recited with no feeling. Kim Chambers is another &#39;great actress&#39; from blockbuster hits such as &quot;Karate Cop&quot;, and she puts in a similar great performance in this one... The only positive aspect is that it was not Erik Estrada but Jim Brown doing the martial arts as I had feared after reading the movie info on cable. In short: do not waste your time on this one. It belongs back in 1991 - and even back then I would have been disappointed.

This is without a doubt the greatest, wildest, most gloriously ridiculous and hilarious action movie ever made about a kick-boxing, a**-whupping, limb-breaking vigilante Catholic priest with the gift of second sight. Yes, you read that correctly. Our hero (woodenly played by martial arts champion Michael Foley, who&#39;s now a karate teacher) is a devout man of the cloth blessed with amazing psychic powers (he has premonitions of evil events right before they happen) and even more extraordinary deadly chopsocky skills. The butt-stomping padre is sent to a particularly hellish crime-ridden section of downtown Los Angeles. Pretty soon he&#39;s cleaning up the heretofore dirty and downtrodden neighborhood, cracking down hard on rapists, drug dealers and other such no-account scum of the earth sinner types. If you think the above plot synopsis sounds unbelievably absurd and outrageous (and it&#39;s certainly both, but in the best &quot;what the hell?&quot; jaw-dropping surrealistically dreadful way imaginable), just wait until you actually watch this fabulously freaky flick. Two of the priests are played by none other than faded &quot;C.H.I.P.S.&quot; dip Erik Estrada and an especially sour Jan-Michael Vincent, the latter as a cranky man of the cloth who&#39;s most sincere wish is that God would grant him a transfer already! (Pay astute attention to the newspaper Mr. Vincent holds in a bulk of his scenes; at one truly magical point you can briefly see pages of the script with Jan&#39;s lines on them glued inside the paper!). Their irritatingly perky landlady is portrayed by blonde bubble-head Judy Landers of crummy TV infomercial fame! Better still, a couple of nefarious dope peddlers Foley foils are portrayed by none other than onetime 70&#39;s blaxploitation biggie Jim Brown and the massive &quot;Maniac Cop&quot; himself Robert Z&#39;Dar, who looks uncharacteristically suave and spiffy here in a finely pressed suit. All those above cited folks are a definite hoot and a half to watch embarrass themselves royally on screen, but the guy who clearly makes off with the Grand Booby Prize is my main man Don Stroud, whose incredibly berserk and over-the-top hambone turn as a thoroughly deranged fruitcake serial killer who thinks he&#39;s a vampire is an absolute gut-busting riot to behold. Poor Don looks and sounds like hell here: Fat, pasty and way out of shape (Don goes shirtless in one scene and it sure ain&#39;t a pretty sight), with black raccoon rings around his half-closed eyes and blurting out his insane ranting dialog in a pained raspy croak, Stroud appears to have spent an insubstantial amount of time at a drug detoxification center. One simply hasn&#39;t lived until witnessing the sublimely screwy moment in which a cheesy computer-animated skull on Don&#39;s dresser comes alive and shouts: &quot;Otis, give me some blood! Kill the b**ch! Kill her!&quot; Oh yeah, Don keeps the skulls of his female victims and uses them as cereal bowls (now, that&#39;s something special). Even more astounding is the sight of Foley in full clerical garb (white collar, flowing black robe, the whole works, baby) popping up at various crime scenes brandishing Chinese stars, daggers shaped like crucifixes, and pearl-handled 45 caliber pistols with crosses emblazoned on them. And Foley even gives the low-life hoodlums an ultimatum before busting loose with his quick&#39;n&#39;lethal martial arts skills: They can either ask God for forgiveness and get on the straight&#39;n&#39;narrow path of pure goodness or face the righteously destructive fury of Father Beatdown. Why, this wonderfully wacked marvel even comes complete with an alarmingly atrocious rap ending credits theme song! Needless to add, this honey rates highly as truly essential viewing for hard-core oddball bad film buffs.

Robert Rundle is a maniac. Seriously, who knew that the director of Cybernator and Run Like Hell-- as well as scarecrow #1 in Dark Harvest, ninja guard #1 in Big Sister 2000 and Bo Stompkins in Raw Energy -- and writers Randall Frakes (Rollerblade, Hell Comes to Frogtown) and Tanya York (Frogtown II) would be able to create such a piece of outright lunacy? I always discuss movies seemingly made by aliens that have no idea what humanity is like and beam us their ideas and as such they&#39;re so strange that nothing seems like anything a human being would do. This is the movie we send back to them. The Vampire of Los Angeles (Don Stroud) is the kind of killer that only direct-to-video can give us. He randomly picks up women and does all manner of odd things to them, like keeping their skulls for cereal bowls and injecting their blood into his veins. Oh yeah -- one of the skulls talks to him and has gotten inside his head and not in the way that skulls should be in your head. Stroud is absolutely going for it in this movie and seeing as how the last four movies he did before this were Donald Jackson roller blade-related movies, I get the feeling he had the chance to really stretch his wings as an actor. And by stretching his wings, I mean screaming at the top of his lungs and taking Polaroids of himself in the mirror. In the very same neighborhood is a house of priests: the Monsignor (Erik Estrada, whose first name is misspelled in the credits), Father Thomas (Jan-Michael Vincent) and Father Daniel (Michael M. Foley, Tracer from WMAC Masters). Most of the time, the priests are all sitting at a table eating dinner, reading their lines off of the newspapers in front of them and interacting with their maid Merna. Yes, the priests have Judy Landers as their maid. Have you started to figure out why I love this movie yet? As we get into the stories of the Vampire draining women of their blood and Father Michael kicking ass for the Lord as a vigilante priest complete with a cross-decorated gun and throwing stars, we also get nearly an entire song by a lovely young lady named Hiroko. She&#39;s also in Miracle Beach, a beach blanket movie that unites Ami Dolenz, Pat Morita, Alexis Arquette, Allen Garfield, Martin Mull and Vincent Schiavelli. I have no idea how a Japanese pop idol got to America much less why she&#39;s in this sleazy movie and even less why she got to sing almost all of her song &quot;My Love&#39;s Waiting.&quot; Otis the vampire has a new target, a girl named Kim (Carrie Chambers, Karate Cop), who is a psychic just like him. Yes, that&#39;s right. He&#39;s not just a vigilante cop who has a gun with a cross on it, he&#39;s also a psychic vigilante cop who has a gun with a cross on it. Kim brings the two stories together, even if I can&#39;t remember how Robert Z&#39;Dar, Jim Brown and Scott Shaw (more Donald Jackson crossover) are part of this. This is the kind of movie where you watch Don Stroud eat corn flakes out of a human skull and make smoothies with blood and beer, all while the psychic cop also has a crucifix knife ready to hear that killer&#39;s deathbed confession. Thanks to my weird movie pals across the pond The Schlock Pit, I learned that Stroud was paid $1,000 a day for this movie. He should have made way, way more than that, because he&#39;s giving this movie everything he has left. This is the kind of movie that people get mad at and I get happy about. It&#39;s just so oddly made, so poorly paced and has the cast equivalent of a horror movie convention, but you know I&#39;d buy every 8x10 Judy Landers has on her table.

User reviews

The Deadly Avenger

The movie as a whole is mishandled

Hilariously over the top vigilante priest movie....!

Substandard - Even for 1991

Behold the righteously destructive fury of Father Beatdown

My head is on fire

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