I’m going to do something that would make all the journalists in my family, living and dead, recoil. I’m going to quote Wikipedia. Of filmmaker Ulli Lommel, the unpaid army of contributors at Wikipedia sayeth:
[He] was a German actor and director, noted for his many collaborations with Rainier Werner Fassbinder and his association with the New German Cinema movement. Lommel spent time at The Factory and was a creative associate of Andy Warhol, with whom he made several films and works of art.
This guy was a high-falutin’ artist. At some point in the 1980s, though, Lommel threw off the shackles of fine art and dedicated himself to a career in shitty movies. Thus freed, he brought viewers a string of glorious cheese, including Overkill, from 1987, which he wrote (with David Scott Kroes), produced, and directed.
Overkill follows Los Angeles cop Mickey Delano, played by Steve Rally, whose main claim to fame is being a three-time Playgirl Magazine centerfold (there is even a brief scene where Delano, undercover, shakes it as a male stripper).
Delano, with his partner, Steiner (Roy Summersett), are part of an organized crime task force. Yakuza activity has been on the uptick, and Delano is convinced this is just the first wave of a Yakuza effort to take over the rackets on the entire west coast, and he wants to stop them before the Yakuza do to the west what the Mafia did to the east. Delano bangs that point home multiple times, in apocalyptic language that would give bootlicking law and order types the fizz.
Meanwhile, in L.A.’s Little Tokyo, teenager Hayaki’s (Jonathan Wong) family is murdered for refusing to pay protection money. This causes Hayaki’s uncle, Akashi (John Nishio), a cop on the Tokyo police force, to fly into town vowing revenge. This is one protagonist too many for a flick like this, so Steiner gets shot in the back, making way for Akashi to team up with Delano. What follows is a pair of rogue cops tearing their way through the Yakuza, in ’80s action style.
There isn’t much about the action set pieces that make Overkill stand out compared to countless other contemporary action films, but it does have its own flare for substandard cinema. My personal favorite are the two Yakuza thugs who travel all around the city, running errands for the bosses, occasionally getting into scraps with Delano and Akashi, while being shirtless. I mean it. Whether they’re picking up dry cleaning or contraband at the Port of Long Beach, shooting innocents in the face or chopping off their own fingers, these two dudes do it without a stitch, natural or synthetic, getting between our eyes and their pecs. Truly glorious shit.
Then there is Steve Rally. One would be hard-pressed to find a hero who looks more like they belong in porn without actually watching porn. To be clear, he’s never been in porn, but he sure looks like he was. And carries himself like he was. And acts like he was. It’s just a very smutty performance from him, hammered home by that brief, and out of nowhere, strip club sequence.
Rally, as of this writing, has twenty-one appearances in film and television in his credits, and that seems a bit low. This kind of work should have been rewarded with two or three shitty movie appearances a year throughout the rest of the ’80s and into the ’90s. But, no. It would be another four years after this before he appeared in another film, although in between he did have a guest spot in the TV series Dangerous Women as…a male stripper.
Overkill is somewhat clumsy and not nearly insane enough to be high in the Watchability Index. It settles into the mediocre middle, displacing Night of the Beast at #347.