Codename: Silencer

David Winters transformed himself from a recognised dance choreographer into a relatively successful trash-movie producer in the 1980s, when his company Action International Pictures, which he established together with the trash fantasist David A. Prior, supplied the global video market with appropriately cheap, disposable genre flicks. The market changed in the 1990s and, in an effort to stay competitive, Winters and Prior tried to bolster their movies by casting bigger names. Body Count was made at Prior’s suggestion in a co-production project of Winters’s new production company, West Side Studios, and the Japanese giant Toei Video Company, one of the leading players in the Asian video market. For a brief time in the mid-1990s, Toei tried several co-productions with American genre-movie companies in order to secure exclusive American action flicks tailored to the Japanese audience. Like previous projects with other American companies – Distant Justice (1992) and New York Undercover Cop (1993) – Body Count was also built on a combination of famous American faces and Japanese action stars. Sonny Chiba dominates the magnificently low-grade cast here as a flawless killer who, with Brigitte Nielsen’s assistance, eliminates members of the detective corps played by the remaining names from the opening credits. Thanks to the financial participation of Toei Video, this flick is characterised by noticeably more competent direction and production compared to the usually hopeless level of the movies made under the patronage of David Winters (including the concept of the kindred Raw Justice, featuring Pamela Anderson). However, the movie is essentially cut off at the knees by its simultaneously overwrought and half-baked screenplay. In fact, the concept actually offers a potentially inventive combination of police thriller/buddy movie and a slasher flick in which the identity of the killer is known from the beginning. Individual killings of police officers by a professional hitman oscillate between action thrills and horror torture scenes, but the useless script causes the whole story to quickly slip into boring repetition due to the incessant piling up of new characters and insipid twists. The ridiculous climax, with a fight aboard a streetcar barrelling (at the blazing speed of six miles an hour) toward a gasoline tanker passing through downtown New Orleans like a monster, is amusing, but it can’t save this shambolic and generic VHS dreck. (14.02.2021)