FINAL SCORE
(aka STRIKE COMMANDO)
(aka ELEGY OF A MASSACRE)
(aka AN ARMY OF ONE)
Dir. Arizal, 1986
88 mins. Indonesia.
In dubbed English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 15 – 8:30 PM

“We can do this the easy way, or I can carve what I want out of you piece-by-piece…”

Christopher Mitchum is Richard Brown, a decorated Vietnam Vet who’s settled into an idyllic family life in Southeast Asia while forging his trade in the computer business. Unfortunately, ultra baddie Donovan Hawk—played by meaty Godfrey Ho regular Mike Abbott—has his own ideas about turning Indonesia into “Silicon Valley 2” and making a lucrative grab in the tech market while using it as a front for his illegal operations. When Brown rebuffs his buyout offer, Hawk dispatches his thugs to slaughter Brown’s wife and child on the boy’s 8th birthday. Now fraught with ‘Nam flashbacks, Brown straps up to settle the FINAL SCORE. He makes an unlikely ally in the form of a beautiful ninja who has insinuated herself as Hawk’s secretary in order to wreak her own revenge over a sister who was forced into prostitution, hooked on drugs and left to die on Hawk’s watch.

This setup is what qualifies as a “pot-boiling slow-burn” in the world of Arizal, and for the majority it’s one of his grimmest films—a stealthy guerilla DEATH WISH in the jungle. But once it kicks into high gear, it’s a never-ending string of some of Arizal’s most insane set pieces, including an epic, logic-and-continuity-defying car chase and a 20-minute climactic moto-massacre with Mitchum throttling a missile-launching dirt bike while blowing up multiple entire houses, not to mention jeeps and people. The final gun-mounted motorcycle vs. gun-mounted helicopter shootout is rad as shit.