A peace researcher (David Carradine) is kidnapped and a high ransom requested. The daughter of the peace researcher hires a bunch of happy amateurs playing mercenaries to rescue his father. Everything does not go as smoothly as planned and they quickly begin to realize that the task they have undertaken is much more dangerous than they had anticipated. The Mad Bunch is written by Timothy Earle and Mats Helge Olsson who also directs alongside Arne Mattson. It´s one more swedish production that tries to pass itself off as American. The acting is pretty horrible but everybody knows that nobody watches a Mats Helge Olsson movie for the acting. The camerawork and editing is pretty decent, some scenes are too dark (could be due to poor source material, I think they´ve used a VHS as master for this), the quality of picture is so and so. And I´ll mention that the audio is pretty bad. Even if the running time is just 86 minutes I found the flick to be pretty dull and I found myself looking at the clock time and again. The action is uninspired and just plain boring. We get gunplay, shootouts and some pretty bad fightchoreography. There is plenty intentional comic relief but there is also a lot of unintentional comedy due to this being so bad. There is some very brief gore as some character gets his throat cut off and there are a few squibs so it´s hard to believe that this is made by the same man who gave us the ultraviolent The Ninja Mission. Nothing to report in the T & A department.
This review is based upon the swedish region 2 DVD release from JGS AB.
Rating: 0½ out of 7. I did not enjoy this.... The Mad Bunch is utterly boring, borderline idiotic and even if there are a few good scenes they can´t save this mess. This is without a doubt the weakest of the Mats Helge Olsson flicks I´ve seen so far.
/JL
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