The Firing Line

1988 "The Shortest Distance Between Life and Death"
3.2| 1h31m| en| More Info
Released: 04 April 1988 Released
Producted By: Silver Screen International
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

An American military advisor becomes disillusioned by the brutality and corruption of the Central American government which hired him. When his shift in sympathies becomes known, he's arrested and tortured but soon escapes, along with a beautiful American woman, in order to join the rebels.

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Michael Ledo Mark Hardin (Reb Brown) works for the government killing communist rebels in an unnamed Latin American country. (Filmed in Philippines.) When one of his captured rebels is raped and killed, he beats up a major which lands him as a criminal and rebel suspect. He escapes and takes Shannon Tweed along with him and joins up with the rebels, reluctant to take him in.The sound track was very typical and comical. The fight scenes were needlessly drawn out to 5-6 minutes because the story had no real plot.Guide: F-word, sex, implied rape. A Shannon Tweed film without nudity. Available on a 50 DVD collection
arfdawg-1 The Plot. An American military adviser becomes disillusioned by the brutality and corruption of the Central American government which hired him. When his shift in sympathies becomes known, he's arrested and tortured but soon escapes, along with a beautiful American woman, in order to join the rebels.Well it's sharp focus any way, even if the entire movie is a mess and just plain stoopid.The whole first 15 minutes is just aerial rockets exploding and people synchronized dying. It gets boring real quick.It's poorly directed.
Wizard-8 Previous user commenters have been quick to attack this movie, so I thought for a change I would list the good things found in the movie. It was shot on actual jungle locations. The filmmakers managed to acquire military equipment such as helicopters and armored vehicles. And.... uh... ah... the movie was shot in color... and... uh... oh, who am I kidding? This is a terrible movie in just about every way you can think of. There are a lot of action sequences, but they have been almost totally drained of excitement, and the fact that sometimes you can't tell who are the bad guys and who are the good guys in these action sequences doesn't help. Reb Brown is pretty bland as the lead, and while Shannon Tweed does add a little eye candy, her one nude sequence is staged in a way that you don't really get to see anything. Since the movie has apparently fallen into the public domain, it's pretty cheap and easy to acquire, but you'd be better off saving your money and time to get a much better movie.
AssProphet Audio:Seriously I've never seen a movie with worse audio. There are scenes where people are walking through the grass, and you can hardly hear them over their footsteps. They must be miking their feet. You know how in some movies they forget a line, so they have to dub it in on a shot of the back of someone's head. Here the editors were not that clever. There is actually a scene where Shannon Tweed's character says her line without moving her lips at all!I'm pretty sure for their background sound they played effects loops live while shooting, because in a lot of scenes the sound effects will either be different or be absent whenever the camera changes angles.I could write a lot more on how bad the audio is in this movie.Other Nuggets:In this movie they probably consider the opening credits to be special effects because they seemed so challenging to produce. The main title and the first few names in the opening credits are in white text over a white sky, and they wobble as if they were carefully hand painted on each frame.The reuse of extras in this movie is incredible. There are about 15 rebels in the cast, and yet in any given battle thirty or more of them will be killed. If only the film were high enough quality to distinguish which ones were dying over and over.It's also interesting to note that the rebels are usually killed by explosions that are always between 30 and 200 feet away. There is one scene one scene when some of the rebels are running out of their huts in the rebel base, and one huts shakes as the rebel exits the door. It makes you wonder if the hut will last long enough to encounter the inevitable explosion.There is a blue helicopter that looks as menacing as a pair of running shorts, but somehow is equipped with an infinite supply of missiles. When they show the missiles being shot out of the helicopter's missile bays, the often shoot of in unpredictable directions very closely resembling large bottle rockets. They still manage to hit their targets with ease, which as noted above is always a very safe distance away from the rebels they kill. Note the recycled footage of the pilot pressing the LIVE button to fire the missiles (because it's printed vertically, the first few times we saw it, we read it as the "EVIL" button).Notice how the grenade launcher they use, produces identical explosions to those that are created by the helicopter missiles. It's also fun in many scenes how the actor in the foreground is shooting in a completely different direction than the group of enemy soldiers that he is killing. And frequently, characters shoot a disproportionate number of bullets to the soldiers who are killed (like when a short burst fire kills a large group of enemies).Yes this movie is very very very bad. The plot was thought out almost as well as a 5 year old's soccer game, and the editing is the worst I've ever seen. But honestly, sometimes it's fun spend 90 minutes laughing at a group of adults who sincerely took part in such a terrible movie.