What a strange buddy cop flick. From a story by David A. Prior (screenplay by Henry Madden), and produced by David Winters, two of the founders of Action International Pictures, one of Shitty Movie Sundays’ favorite production companies, Body Count is a collaboration with Toei, one of the giants of Japanese cinema. The film even features one of Japan’s biggest movie stars, Sonny Chiba, as the villain. I don’t know what the suits in Japan were expecting, but I have a feeling it wasn’t a direct-to-video b-action flick where one of the most bankable stars in Japan’s history plays the bad guy opposite a pair of character actors in rare starring roles.
Robert Davi and Steven Bauer play New Orleans police detectives Eddie Cook and Vinnie Rizzo. Part of a major crimes squad, they’ve been trying to nail the Gianelli brothers, gangsters, for the better part of a decade. But, they are about to exchange one problem for another. An international assassin, Makato (Chiba), has been hired to kill the Gianellis. Makato is successful, but the police receive a tip about Makato’s payoff, and Eddie and Rizzo are able to bust him, sending Makato to prison for life.
Over a year later, Makato is a raging ball of fury and hate toiling on a Louisiana work gang, when he is busted out by a disciple, a real true believer in Makato’s killer excellence, in Sybil, played by Brigitte Nielsen.
Her appearance is a treat. Nielsen is a large woman with distinctive features, and director Talun Hsu used this to great effect. Her hair is bleached to the point even Marilyn Monroe would beg for mercy, her heels are tall, there isn’t a bright color she doesn’t wear, a cut that isn’t low enough, and her walk is mean. She couldn’t act her 
way out of a wet paper bag, yet Nielsen is probably what viewers will remember most about watching the movie. Her casting is inspired, for a shitty movie.
Eddie and Rizzo are aided by Special Agent Janet Hood (Cindy Ambuehl), whose main contribution to the story is looking hot, being Eddie’s would-be love interest, and wearing an inappropriately short skirt to a funeral. At least it was black.
Getting caught and going to prison is the risk one runs when committing crimes, but Makato takes his incarceration personally. He believes that someone on Eddie and Rizzo’s squad was his secret employer, and set him up for the fall in order to get out of paying. It turns out he’s right, but he doesn’t know which cop was responsible, so he and Sybil go on a killing spree, taking out squad members one after the other, Lethal Weapon-style. This leads to, of course, a final confrontation.
Being predictable, this movie lives and dies on its execution, and there is good news. Early on, this flick moves. The pace is great. The editing in early action scenes is taut (Tony Lanza and Steven Nielson), and even the cinematography (Blake T. Evans) is worthy of action flicks with much higher aspirations. As the film goes on, though, things become more rote, and the movie settles into something much closer to what David Winters normally produced.
One thing that does stay consistent throughout is the acting. Sure, Nielsen stinks, but Chiba gives a strong physical performance. Meanwhile Davi and Bauer were, dare I say, good? Both were very experienced by this time in their careers, and seemed to relish taking on such prominent parts.
The flashes of true competence, combined with some nicely outrageous moments, mostly courtesy of Nielsen, make Body Count a better movie than one would expect. It breaks into the hallowed top 100 of the Watchability Index, displacing Primal at #92. It’s not quite shitty gold, but it’s close.