It was no easy matter to make the stupidest action movie of the whole 1980s. There were ninjas in the Earth in those days, and some of them had the power to come back from the dead and possess an ersatz Jennifer Beals. Sylvester Stallone challenged the Viet Cong to a rematch, then helped the heroic Taliban kick the Russians out of Afghanistan. Charles Bronson solved the crack problem with a ten-pound pistol, Chuck Norris proved that cheap beer beat spinach as the poor man’s super-soldier serum, and the traditional arsenal of vigilante heroes expanded to include flamethrowers and weaponized monster trucks. Teenagers could subjugate Libya with the aid of Louis Gossett Jr. and a stolen F-16, or liberate a supine America from the conquering hordes of Fidel Castro, and audiences would bat nary an eyelash.
What could any mere mortal do to create a film so devoid of sense, taste, and plausibility that it could stand out against a background like that as a conspicuous low point?
Well, the makers of MegaForce were surely mortal, but there was nothing mere about them. Indeed, this was an almost mystical convergence of bad movie mojo. Although MegaForce was released through 20th Century Fox, the production company was Golden Harvest, the Hong Kong side of the partnership responsible for The Big Brawl, who were apparently still angling for a piece of the American market two years after that commercial misfire.
In the director’s chair, meanwhile, was Hal Needham, auteur of such milestone white-trash car-chase comedies as Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run. Throw in Barry Bostwick, of all people, as the world’s least convincing Chuck Norris counterfeit and an array of “futuristic” military hardware plainly designed with an eye toward the shelves at Toys ‘R’ Us, and you’ve got a more-than-promising starting point for a more-than-failed film… read more >
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