Richard Young plays as Vince Deacon, a much honoured veteran of the Vietnam War, and subsequently a supervisor of a Los Angeles Police Department (L.A.P.D.) SWAT team. Action opens in 1972 with Vince in a combat situation crammed with slaughter deep inside of a Laotian jungle (performed by a Philippine jungle) where a former Army comrade, Slater (John Dresden) has turned traitor, thereby siding with the Viet Cong. Deacon naturally finds such apostasy to be unacceptable and, going on a rampage, thrashes Slater to a pulp. With the war past, the film's locale shifts to another form of violence-filled civilisation, in Los Angeles, where Deacon, married and having had a son, does his fighting to the service of the L.A.P.D. Slater, discovering Deacon's whereabouts through television news reporting, arranges for thugs to attack Vince's wife and child in their home. Deacon frustrates this felonious attempt, in the process killing one of the intruders. Although quite possibly the only person in the world who would not be supportive of Vince's resolute defence of his family, Deacon's supervisor, in expected Hollywoodian fashion, demands to be given the hero's badge, while suspending him from active duty, thereby allowing the Deacons to immediately take a much-needed vacation. A weekend of camping is planned in a somewhat bucolic forested region, this seeming to be just what is needed to lift Vince's spirits, but Slater has not been dissuaded by the failure of his henchmen, and renews his assault against Deacon's wife and son. A mania for revenge then possesses the former Green Beret. He soon discovers that he must confront not only the treacherous Slater, but also the latter's rural sheriff brother, an assemblage of imbecilic rednecks, and even the National Guard, all of whom must be vanquished before he may be declared the winner of what has become a brutal contest of wills. It may not be surprising if a viewer decides that much of this action seems familiar, since a good deal of the narrative is derivative from films of a similar forgettable nature, notably, and virtually scene for scene identical with, the initial "Rambo" movie: FIRST BLOOD, that was completed two years prior to this thing, but with a much larger budget. As Deacon avenges himself upon his sundry tormentors, it becomes increasingly obvious that due attention has not been paid by the production team to the film's dialogue as to its action sequences. Yet after all, this is a stuntman's picture, explosives specialists following close behind in importance, each within a pre-CGI environment, and even though the work offers essentially only an assault upon a viewer's sensibilities, this has an advantage of eliminating any need for a decision as to whether or not it will be watched more than once.
