1985
Starring: Erik Estrada, Ennio Girolami, Michael Pritchard, Peggy Rowe.
I'd never heard of this movie before but Jen's boyfriend was excited to share it with us, so we all headed over to his place to watch it. In preparation I watched the trailer on youtube so I had some hints that it involved lasers, dune buggy's and car chases.
It begins with two teens, a guy and a girl, hanging in a train yard. They are flirting with each other and once they get to a certain car they begin having sex. Little do they know that there is some test going on, we see a giant LED clock flash the hour, then a laser blast and their bodies are melted into oblivion.
The location of the train yard is unknown, but the next scene gives us the setting of San Francisco. A bank is being held up by two guys, they have taken hostages and they're surrounded by the police. They rattle off their demands including having some lunch brought to them by a specific cop, but they include the detail that the cop has to be naked. We see some nude legs walking towards the bank, the meal is revealed to be a roast turkey surrounded by french fries. Inspector Ronn Warren (Erik Estrada) is the cop who is delivering the lunch, it is revealed that he is wearing black briefs. The robbers laugh at him, then he pushes out a gun that was hidden in the turkey and shoots them. What a cop!
At a race track, the same evil laser guy sets up his laser and ends up killing a lot of the audience at the track. Since this is the second laser melting it comes to the attention of police, plus the mayor receives a letter from the laser scientist. Dr. Yuri Soboda (Ennio Girolami) developed this crazy water powered laser and now he wants $10 million dollars or he'll use it to destroy San Francisco. Ronn and his partner are on the case. The rest of the movie is various car chases and shootouts until Ronn tracks down Dr. Soboda and watches him be destroyed by his own invention.
I do enjoy action movies but I often have a harder time with older ones, so this movie was fun but I can't say I loved it. There is a fantastic death scene from an old lady in curlers and a housecoat, very melodramatic. Erik Estrada basically uses a turkey gun, which is nuts. It's always fun to see some locations in the bay area, it's changed so much since the '80s that it's hard to tell where everything is. From a tiny bit of research it seems like it was an Italian production but at least to me it looks like a lot of is was actually shot in and around San Francisco.
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