Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 25, 1995 TAG: 9503010039
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Lambert, who plays Paul Racine, is revealed to be wearing a pair of piggy boxer shorts.
"Piggies," Chen breathes.
"Yeah, piggies. I like piggies," Lambert replies.
"Yeah, I like piggies too," Chen says, misty-eyed.
This is the kind of smoldering dialogue you will miss if you have the good sense not to see this terrible movie, a perfect comeuppance for Lawton who is apparently one of the shallowest people writing for the movies.
The story is as thin as possible. Racine, an American businessman (with an unexplained French accent, of course), is in Nagoya, Japan, having a drink at the bar, where he encounters a beautiful, mysterious Japanese woman (Chen) in a really knock-out red dress. (Biggest tragedy of the movie comes in the scene where Chen gets in the hot tub with the dress on, the fool. We're talking $3,000 worth of haute couture down the drain.)
Anyway, Racine and mysterious woman get drunk together, wander around listening to some awesome Japanese drum solos in the gardens behind the hotel, return to her room (tub incident follows) and act as adults will under such circumstances. Chen, whose name turns out to be Kirina, tells Racine to beat it, and he leaves, only to discover that he has grabbed HER room key, not his.
He lets himself back into her room just in time to see her being decapitated by a Ninja guy (John Lone). Ninja guy's two sidekick Ninjas throw a shuriken (that's one of those wheely-looking spike things, invariably dipped in some deadly poison) into Racine's neck and flee the premises.
But Racine survives, only to be attacked by a veritable battalion of back-up Ninjas in the hospital. Imagine Racine filling out one of those surveys hospitals send out after you've been sent home and him getting to the questions about how comfortable the hospital made him during his recovery. Racine: "Recovery impeded by rampaging Ninjas."
Thank goodness for the GOOD Samurai and his wife, who hustle Racine off to their secret island fortress. But first, they must slay about 20 more Ninjas (dressed as golfers) on the 5 a.m. bullet train from Nagoya. At least 40 people die in this scene, and the female Ninja leader scrapes off her own face with a sword in one particularly memorable moment.
A movie as low-brow as this deserves a really low-brow summary, and here it is:
Icky, icky, icky.
The Hunted
turkey
A Universal Pictures release showing at Salem Valley 8 and Valley View Cinema. Rated R for extraordinary violence and some nudity. 120 mins.
by CNB