P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE (US - 1986) Directed by Gideon Amir. Written by Jeremy Lipp, James Bruner, Malcolm Barbour and John Langley. Cast: David Carradine, Mako, Charles R. Floyd, Steve James, Phil Brock, Daniel Demorest, Tony Pierce, Steve Freedman, James Acheson, Rudy Daniels, Ken Metcalfe, Kenneth Weaver, Jim Gaines, Eric Hahn, Henry Strzlkowski. (R, 89 mins) "He's got one rule that's never been broken: everybody goes home!" Released by Cannon in the spring of 1986, the Namsploitation outing P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE isn't a MISSING IN ACTION sequel but it might as well be. It shares one MISSING IN ACTION co-writer and its plot has quite a few surface similarities with MISSING IN ACTION 2: THE BEGINNING, but instead of Chuck Norris as Col. James Braddock, we get David Carradine as Col. Jim Cooper, a military legend and Pentagon strategist who volunteers for One Last Mission. It's 1973 Vietnam, five days before the cease fire, and the US is launching a last hurrah raid on a known POW camp out of concern that the men will be forgotten after the cease fire and declared MIA. Cooper's rule is "Everybody goes home!" but that's not the case when the small unit accompanying him is wiped out in a chopper explosion waiting for Cooper, who went back to save the injured young Teague (Kenneth Weaver), whose fate was sealed the moment he kissed a cross on his necklace and declared "I got my own insurance right here." Instead of freeing the men, Cooper ends up captured with them in a camp run by the ruthless Capt. Vinh (THE SAND PEBBLES Oscar-nominee Mako). Vinh is informed that Cooper is now the highest-ranking American in captivity and his commanders want him taken to Hanoi for a sham trial before being executed, but Vinh has another idea: he wants Cooper to take him to Saigon, where Vinh will renounce his allegiance to North Vietnam and defect to the US to join relatives in Miami.
Of course, Vinh has ulterior motives, mostly involving an ever-growing stash of gold and jewelry he's confiscated from American POWs over the years that he intends to cash in once he's in America, but for the time being Cooper agrees to the plan, with one caveat: the POWs go with them, because everybody goes home. Complicating matters is loose cannon POW Sparks (Charles R. Floyd), who attempts one failed escape before constantly putting everyone in jeopardy looking out for #1, basically functioning as this film's "Waingro from HEAT" before the filmmakers grant him an unlikely redemption in the end. Just out on Blu-ray from Scorpion (because physical media is dead), P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE was the directing debut of Gideon Amir, who logged some time in the trenches for Cannon, doing first AD and second unit work on films like THE AMBASSADOR and MISSING IN ACTION, and co-writing AMERICAN NINJA before Menahem Golan gave him a shot at making his own movie. Amir does a serviceable job and keeps the film moving, but there's a couple of hiccups, namely a bizarre moment when a nighttime Jeep chase just abruptly ends and cuts to the next morning. Amir has only directed one other movie to date--1989's ACCIDENTS--but remains active in cable and streaming TV shows, most recently as a producer on Amazon Prime's CARNIVAL ROW and DC Universe's DOOM PATROL.
Shot mostly in the Philippines (as evidenced by the presence of Cirio H. Santiago regulars like Ken Metcalfe, Jim Gaines, Eric Hahn, and Henry Strzalkowski in bit parts), with some obvious reshoots in L.A. (the scenery's different and Carradine's hair is longer in some shots), P.O.W. utilized much of AMERICAN NINJA's crew and, most notably, co-star Steve James, again relegated to sidekick duty as Jonston, a POW who becomes Cooper's closest confidant en route to Saigon. It's always great to see James, a terrific actor with top-notch action skills who succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 1994 at just 41, and one who was always cited as a genuinely great guy by everyone who worked with him. Cannon gave James a lot of work, but they never used him to his full potential. Even when he finally secured top billing in 1989's Michael Dudikoff-less AMERICAN NINJA 3: BLOOD HUNT, he was still saddled playing second fiddle to new American Ninja David Bradley, when simply handing the franchise over to James would've been a much smarter decision. P.O.W. seems more interested in making a star of "Charles R. Floyd," who had appeared on the last few years of the long-running daytime soap THE EDGE OF NIGHT under the name "Charles Grant," and who, according to Amir in a newly-shot interview on the Blu-ray, was seen by Golan as "a new James Dean." Not quite. Not helping Floyd/Grant--either an aspiring actor or the least cooperative person in witness protection--was the fact that he acted in three different Cannon films under three different names. He's "Charles R. Floyd" here, he was "Charles Floye" in THE DELTA FORCE, and he was credited in RAPPIN' as "Charles Flohe." Following P.O.W., he found consistent work on more daytime soaps like ANOTHER WORLD, SANTA BARBARA, and THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, reverting back to his "Charles Grant" name.
P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE would be one of the last times Carradine headlined a relatively wide theatrical release, even though he never stopped working until his death in 2009, and he was so prolific that he still turned up in over a dozen movies you've never heard of that were trickling out as late as 2013. He was still getting high-profile TV gigs like the miniseries NORTH AND SOUTH and NORTH AND SOUTH BOOK II around the time of P.O.W., but he would soon embark on a long stretch of mostly crummy B-movies and D-list straight-to-video titles. A supporting role as the villain in the 1990 Mel Gibson/Goldie Hawn comedy BIRD ON A WIRE was his only dalliance with the A-list until Quentin Tarantino gave him a brief respite with the KILL BILL films in 2003 and 2004. That got him some better TV guest spots in the short term, but the resurgence that everyone was expecting never happened, and he was soon back to garbage movies, and that includes his supporting turn as "Poon Dong" in 2009's unwatchable CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE. He's a solid hero in P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE, and definitely brings more of a loose screen presence to the proceedings than the more stoical Norris did to the MISSING IN ACTION films. He even goes one step further with the blatant "America! Fuck yeah!" jingoism by spending most of the climactic battle literally draped in the American flag as he blows away VC commies before one of the guys leads them all in a "Proud Mary" sing-along. Suck on that, Chuck!
P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE opening in Toledo, OH on 4/4/1986
NAM ANGELS (US/Philippines - 1989) Directed by Cirio H. Santiago. Written by Dan Gagliasso. Cast: Brad Johnson, Vernon Wells, Kevin Duffis, Rick Dean, Mark Venturini, Jeff Griffith, Romy Diaz, Ken Metcalfe, Archie Adamos, Eric Hahn, Tonichi Fructuoso, Frederick Bailey, Leah Navarro. (R, 93 mins) Filipino exploitation auteur Cirio H. Santiago (1936-2008) dabbled in nearly every genre over the course of his long career, specializing in blaxploitation knockoffs in the mid '70s and post-nukes in the early '80s, but as B-movie trends went, so went Santiago. By the late '80s, after the success of macho MIA rescue fantasies like UNCOMMON VALOR, MISSING IN ACTION and RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II, and more serious films like the Oscar-winning PLATOON and Stanley Kubrick's FULL METAL JACKET, Namsploitation became one of the most profitable genres for the burgeoning home video market. Ripoffs flooded New Release shelves at video stores nationwide, whether it was Santiago's Philippines-shot actioners or Italian knockoffs like Fabrizio De Angelis' THUNDER WARRIOR series and OPERATION NAM, and Bruno Mattei's legendarily craptacular STRIKE COMMANDO. Even Australia got into the act with Brian Trenchard-Smith's cult classic THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA. Usually working in conjunction with Roger Corman, Santiago cranked out a ton of Namsploitationers from 1984 to 1993, including FINAL MISSION (1984), THE DEVASTATOR (1986), EYE OF THE EAGLE (1987), BEHIND ENEMY LINES (1988), THE EXPENDABLES (1988), EYE OF THE EAGLE III (1989), FIELD OF FIRE (1991), BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY (1992), FIREHAWK (1993), and KILL ZONE (1993) before demand died down and he moved on to a string of kickboxing movies.
EYE OF THE EAGLE III is probably Santiago's best Namsploitation outing (he sat out 1988's EYE OF THE EAGLE II), but a close second is 1989's NAM ANGELS, a loose remake of the 1970 Jack Starrett drive-in hit THE LOSERS mixed with a little KELLY'S HEROES. Just out on Blu-ray from Code Red in further defiance of the "Physical media is dead" myth (and introduced by Code Red head Bill Olsen in his inane "Banana Man" get-up, referring to Cirio Santiago as "Sollio Sariago"), NAM ANGELS opens at the height of the Vietnam War as Army Lt. Vance Calhoun (a debuting Brad Johnson) loses most of his men in a skirmish while the rest are taken prisoner by Chard (Vernon Wells, best known as Wez in THE ROAD WARRIOR), a "round eye" mercenary with ties to both the CIA and the North Vietnamese, who has set up shop as a despotic ruler, out there operating without any decent restraint, beyond the...oh wait, that's Col. Kurtz. Back at the base, Calhoun can't convince Gen. Donipha (Ken Metcalfe) to send in a rescue team, so he organizes his own--an off-the-books op where he recruits a quartet of incarcerated Hell's Angels who were nabbed trying to smuggle drugs out of Cambodia back to the States. Calhoun gets them out and convinces them they're on a mission to recover $10 million in VC gold that his men found in a cave on the outskirts of Chard's camp. Calhoun and Army mechanic Hickman (Kevin Duffis) butt heads with the biker gang leader Larger (Rick Dean) and the rest of the Angels--Bonelli (Mark Venturini), Carmody (Jeff Griffith), and Turko (Romy Diaz), especially when Larger finds out the primary reason for the journey--but before long, they set aside their differences and find common ground, realizing they have to work together to make it out alive...if they don't kill each other first!
NAM ANGELS is one of Santiago's fastest-paced programmers. The director drops the ball when it comes to period detail, best represented by Santiago capturing the exact and very brief window in time in 1989 when Chard's rather ahead-of-its-time and decidedly un-1969 combination mullet/tiny ponytail would be even remotely socially acceptable, and he has the chutzpah to close the film with a John Milton quote ("Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven"), but NAM ANGELS is a lot of fun. The action, explosions, and motorcycle stunts are almost non-stop, and there's some attempt at making a serious statement ("Even your own people don't care about you!" Chard yells when Calhoun realizes no one's coming to rescue them), and while none of these guys are any great shakes as actors, there's enough of a developing camaraderie over the course of the film that it turns into a better-than-expected men-on-a-mission outing.
The film marked the big-screen debut of Johnson, a professional rodeo cowboy who served a three-year stint as the Marlboro Man before turning to modeling and eventually acting. Like many before him, Johnson got his start in the world of Roger Corman (and Santiago put Johnson's lassoing skills to use throughout NAM ANGELS) but it wasn't long before he was declared a Next Big Thing. Later in 1989, still a virtual unknown and given an "Introducing" credit despite already starring in NAM ANGELS, he was picked by Steven Spielberg to co-star with Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, and the legendary Audrey Hepburn in the director's ALWAYS. He next starred with Danny Glover and Willem Dafoe in John Milius' 1991 military actioner FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER, and...that was it. With the big studios deciding they already had one actor to fill their Tom Berenger needs, Johnson's time on the A-list was short-lived, rivaled in its brevity only by Patrick Bergin, another Next Big Thing from that same period who flamed out in record time. Like Bergin, Johnson became a fixture in the world of straight-to-video and/or cable, with films like 1993's THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT 2, 1994's THE BIRDS II, and 1995's LONE JUSTICE 2, along with several TV gigs and the syndicated series SOLDIER OF FORTUNE, INC, with fellow straight-to-video mainstay Tim Abell. Johnson's career got a second wind with the faithsploitation crowd when he co-starred as pilot Rayford Steele in the Kirk Cameron-headlined LEFT BEHIND trilogy, but with the exception of a one-off comeback in the barely-seen church-funded indie NAIL 32 in 2015, the devoutly religious Johnson's been retired from acting since 2008. Now 56 and the father of ten with his wife of 30 years, Johnson appears to have left Hollywood behind and now owns a real estate and property development company.
