The Bad Pack

The Bad Pack_720p(480P)

Might as well watch an episode of the A Team or Knight Rider, it looks so late 90s cheese action made for tv movie though it probably wasn't, think TBS on a Sunday afternoon type B movie. Roddy Piper did a fun job, Davi was his usual self, the Austrian guy I can't put a finger on, maybe he was in Beer Fest with the Super Trooper guys circa 2000s. It was a silly frivolous cheaply made quickie with chessy bad guys, a few familiar faces and the usual poor Immigrant folks who need help lol. Watch it for a laugh, I paid a $1 for it at a charity shop, worth about 50 cents of that but you can't beat cheese, it's no Tango and Cash, or Expendables or 7 Samurai but it is old school silly fun for 80s kids. Late night or Sun afternoon if nothing else is on. But 12 reviews says it all lol.

Usually, these low budget affairs seek to cash in on a cinematic heavyweights popularity, here we have what could be considered the opposite. You could be forgiven for thinking that part of the production process of making 2010's The Expendables was watching 1997's The Bad Pack, given the similarities. Set in a small Texas border town, under attack by a local militia group, Mexican immigrants hire a band of mercenaries to protect them. Robert Davi and Roddy Piper provide the star names in what I found to be a very enjoyable low budget independent action movie, one which deserved more backing and perhaps even a franchise.

Seeing a majority of bad to very bad reviews here, I'd like to make my point too. The Bad Pack isn't perfect or very good, but I wouldn't call it bad either - a low budget action comedy (both aspects maybe slightly under-dosed) with interesting faces. Same old, same old story elements of course.. but it didn't bore me. The roles of the ultimately 7 "samurai" were marked enough that I could remember them all the next day (the Sniperess, the Madman in particular). The "Sons of Texas" militia was not played out much, and never did one see the hundred I kept hearing about. One extra point for the Latinos to travel by train - I always like to see Amtrak and a Union Station. And their odyssey in L.A. was cute and touching. 6/10.

Not sure how this movie was as bad as it was as it had a couple of stars, a mildly good premise and what one thought was going to be a very violent conclusion with guns blazing, but here we are. None of the stars seem interested, not even ones who should if they wanted to keep getting roles, the premise did not work because the big bad conclusion one expects in a film like this turned into a slight pit stop. I have been in fast food drive in lines longer than the 'explosive' finale lasts... The plot, a town on Mexican Americans are being harassed by a group of racist militia types. Who do they turn to for help? Well, a group of highly trained solider of fortunes, a kind of A-Team if you will, only they are more like the C-Team; however, that being said as easy as they take down the militia, the Mexicans could have just bought guns and skipped the middle man and done the whole job themselves... So we get Davi who is good as a villain, but not so good as the hero, who for reasons unknown wears a confederate hat. Not a rebel flag hat, but an actual confederate soldier hat making me wonder who thought that was a good idea. Then there is Rowdy Roddy Piper who plays guy who drives. Seriously, there are more members of the team, but they are so poorly fleshed out as the rest are just crazy guy, buff guy and good shooting girl. Meanwhile, a dude who just joins up for no reason gets more screen time and is fleshed out better. I mean sure, guy stops a bank robbery in a diner I'm at, I wish to serve him like a toady forever...not! So, the film should have been good, but was instead very weak. Not taking inspiration from 80's hardcore action films, but instead kind of being tepid. The bad guys are completely inept and the townspeople should feel embarrassed to have been terrorized by them. Still, good for a laugh or two as we watch this team of misfits get their fairly simple plan to stop the evil doers together.

Unfortunately, this movie is a totally missed opportunity. At first, it looked really interesting. A team of mercenaries was going to Texas to take on some right wing white trash people. It showed a lot of promise when the leader of the mercenaries was doing his recruiting of different characters. With people like Robert Davi, Ralph Moeller and Roddy Piper, this is going to be fun at the end, I thought. But no. The movie just goes on and on without nothing really happening except boring dialogue and lots of preparations. Take Roddy Piper, for example. Almost all he does here is being a driver. Really disappointing. And Ralph Moeller, who is some sort of a fighting champion in the beginning, never fights again in the movie. He is totally under-utilized, and only talks and delivers a few gunshots near the end. The guy was great in Best of the Best 2, so I just don't understand what he was doing here. The last action scene that the whole movie was building up on is just terrible and utter trash. I guess this movie got killed off because of the budget, and overall it must have been braindead people being responsible for this. One of the right wing guys even speaks with an accent!!! Stay away from this, unless you have to watch every action movie ever made.

source: The Bad Pack

Albeit not a horrible film, it wasn't a good film either. A plethora of stereotypes (The cool leader, the insane guy, the ice-cold assassin chick, the happy-go-lucky guy, the introspective muscleman, the computer geek) are paraded out and put through a typical A-Team adventure involving some really badly acted white supremist survivalists who are terrorizing a Tex-Mex boarder town. This is the type of screenplay one knocks out during a slow television night.

Well, whilst I hesitate to say anything good about this film, I think it may just slip into the 'so bad it's good' category. Without a doubt the worst film I have ever watched in my life, I can still remember where I was when I watched it, and whom I watched it with, well over a decade on. This is a film that skips effortlessly up the K2 of bad film-making, blissfully unaware of quite what a difficult achievement it is to combine wooden characters and lines, amateur effects, clichés and anticlimax, all the time without tripping up and straying into parody. Amazing.