Walking the Edge

Robert Forster is his ever-engaging self as Jason Walk, a ballplayer turned part time cabbie & part time numbers runner. He finds his life torn asunder when Christine Holloway (Nancy Kwan), a woman on a suicidal revenge mission, hires his cab. He lets her know in no uncertain terms that he's very unhappy about what she's gotten him into, and yet he is undeniably driven to protect her. The villain is a crime figure named Brusstar (Joe Spinell), who's murdered Christines' lowlife husband; their son also got killed in the crossfire.

"Walking the Edge" is no great shakes as revenge thrillers go, but it's certainly watchable. Forster really makes a lot of the difference, creating another average-Joe protagonist for whom you can easily root. Kwan is less satisfying, but she & Forster do have an interesting, antagonistic chemistry. (She actually has the nerve to accuse him of bungling her mission.). Spinell (who'd also acted with Forster in another revenge thriller, "Vigilante") is always good value; one of his main character traits is that he hates being addressed as "Bruce", and he frequently butts heads with McKee (Wayne Woodson), his number two guy who would like to be number one.

Also featuring other familiar faces such as A Martinez, Doug Toby, Luis Contreras, Ivy Bethune, Jacqueline Giroux, Aarika Wells, and Frankie Hill, this had a long road to the screen. It was filmed in 1982, but legal issues prevented it from being released until 1985.

Also notable for a typically strong Jay Chattaway score.

Six out of 10.

This is a small action-thriller of the vigilante subgenre, so popular in the 80s, with the great Robert Foster being forced to help a woman to find revenge against the gang that murder her family. The villain is performed by the always creepy Joe Spinell and the movie manages to keep things interesting, even with its extreme low budget and very thin script. The acting of these two and the grittiness of the film is by far the best of it.

An exiting and sometimes violent action-thriller with good actors and a good story. Kwan plays a housewife who is married to a gangster (without knowing it). When her family is brutally murdered by some other gangsters, and she manages to escape, she swears revenge to those who killed her son. She seeks cover with a taxi-driver (Forster) who ends up helping her with her bloody revenge.

Good action from the 1980's (7 out of 10)

After witnessing the murder of her husband and son at the hands of drug dealers, "Christine Holloway" (Nancy Kwan) is emotionally traumatized to the point that she is temporarily committed to a sanitarium to assist in her recovery. That being said, when she is eventually released she becomes obsessed with the idea of obtaining her revenge upon those who killed her family. Meanwhile, a taxi driver by the name of "Jason Walk" (Robert Forster) is also having his own personal problems which are only exacerbated with his other job as a collector for a local numbers racket. Unfortunately for him, things quickly go from bad to worse one day when he reluctantly picks up a woman in his taxi who asks to be taken to a couple of locations. Little does he realize that this same woman is about to shoot and kill two different men and that he is soon to be considered as an accessory to these murders. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this could have been a good crime-drama under the right circumstances but the apparent low budget and uneven acting greatly hampered that effort. Even so, I don't consider this to be a bad film by any means and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.

My review was written in January 1985 after a Times Square screening.

Filmed in 1982 under the title "A Deadly Chase", "Walking the Edge" is an antiquated vengeance picture, harking back in most respects to the blaxploitation cycle of a decade earlier. Action prospects are modest for this indie acquisition released by Charles Band's Empire Pictures.

In a strong central performance (overcoming extreme deficiencies in Curt Allen's scriptingand Norbert Meisel's directing), Robert Forster toplines as an L. A. cabbie and numbers runner named Jason Wall, accidentally thrown in with femme-in-trouble Christine (Nancy Kwan), whom he adopts as a protector against gangsters led by the nasty Brusstar (typecast Joe Spinell). One of several irritating plot gaps has Christine suddenly resurfacing, after a violent teaser, opening which has Brusstar and cohorts kill her husband and son, to become a one-woman vengeance squad inolving cabbie Wall.

While harboring Christine at his house and continuing his daily numbers rounds, Wall gradually catches the revenge bug himself, particularly when his garage mechanic buddy Tony (A Martinez0 is brutally tortured and killed by Brusstar. Pic ends unsatisfyingly with star duo having successfully wiped out all the bad guys and facing a non-future.

Qualifying as a B-movie at least two decades after the Bs went out of fashion, "Edge" lacks the colorful casting and intriguing plot twists that made such pictures delightful.

Gore is substituted for exciting action setpieces and the vulgar dialog will need considerable laundering for tv use. Apart from Forster, who inserts sly touches to take the sting out of another sadistic anti-hero, acting honors go to Frankie Hill, stopping the show as a feisty prostitute who first castigaes Wall but later helps him out in a pinch.