Brion James Movies

Sylvester Stallone tries his luck with his first cop buddy movie in Tango and Cash, directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. Stallone is Ray Tango, a Los Angeles narcotics cop who dresses in fancy suits, wears wire-rim glasses, and talks to his stockbroker more than he talks to his mother. Kurt Russell is Gabriel Cash, another Los Angeles narcotics cop who has long, disheveled blonde hair and dresses in worn-out sweatshirts. Together, Tango and Cash are the two best narcs in LA, which causes drug baron Yves Perret (Jack Palance) no end of distress. Since Yves controls a billion-dollar drug empire, Tango and Cash have to be taken out of the picture in some way. So Yves arranges for Tango and Cash to be framed for a crime. But the duo accepts a plea bargain that will give them 18 months in a minimum-security prison. Unfortunately, Yves arranges for their destination to be diverted to a maximum-security hell-hole where Yves's minions proceed to torture Tango and Cash --although they still have time to trade quips with each other. Ultimately, they escape from their torture chamber and seek out Yves and his gang. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Dolph Lundgren stars in this controversial action film directed by Joseph Zito (Missing in Action). The beefy Swede plays Soviet KGB agent Lt. Nikolai, who is sent to Africa with orders to eliminate a black rebel. Eventually, Nikolai begins to side with the locals, has a red scorpion tattooed on his chest by a shaman, and helps fight against the Cubans and the Soviets. Horror fans should note Tom Savini's expert gore effects during a torture scene, while others will be pleased with a fine supporting cast including M. Emmet Walsh, Carmen Argenziano, and Brion James. The film was originally commissioned by Warner Bros., which dropped it after controversy over its South African genesis, but they might as well have dropped it for its endless desert treks and uninvolving screenplay. An unrelated Canadian sequel followed five years later. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Danny Glover and Ruben Blades costar in this made-for-cable death row thriller. Blades plays a condemned prisoner, while Glover plays his psychiatrist. The prisoner's behavior is so violent and erratic that he may be too sick to execute. Glover is brought in to calm Blades down--and if he does so, he will certify that Blades is ready for execution. Dead Man Out first aired over HBO on March 11, 1989. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A scientist (Brion James) who once worked for a high-tech genetics lab has come back in disguise to work as a security guard so that he can free the lab's abused animals. However, the lab has also created a chimera, a man/animal combination, which, in this thriller, is a very violent creature. Once it gets free from its captors, it goes on a killing spree, and the security guard finds himself having to really get into the spirit of his new job. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

"They didn't kill me; I was dead already," is the statement uttered by Dexter Cornell (Dennis Quaid), an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has been poisoned by a slow-acting toxin and who has twenty-four hours to track down his killers before he ceases to exist. Remade from the 1949 Rudolph Mate thriller by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, the co-directors jazz up the old luridness with slap-up doggishness that boosts the intensity-level higher than it deserves to go. Cornell is a burned-out novelist trying to hold on to tenure at the university while seeing his marriage collapse around him. As if that weren't enough, he is receiving amorous come-ons from smart, young student Sydney Fuller (Meg Ryan) and being badgered by another student, Nick Lang (Robert Knepper), to read his brilliant first novel. Not long after Dex demurs to Nick to read his novel, Nick is killed in a fall. Only then does Dex find out that Nick has been having an affair with his wife. Things keep going from bad to worse when, after an all-night drinking binge, Dex discovers that he has been slipped a poison that will kill him within 24 hours. Teaming up with the adoring Sydney, Dex tries to track down the person who poisoned him while dodging the cops, since he happens to be a prime murder suspect. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

A barely recognizable Meryl Streep plays the real-life Lindy Chamberlain, who for a long period in the early 1980s was the most hated woman in Australia. While visiting the Ayers rock monument in the Outback with her husband Michael (Sam Neill), Lindy notices a dingo creeping into the tent where her baby lies sleeping. Seconds later, the horrified woman discovers that her child is gone. Despite Lindy's anguished insistence that the dingo killed her baby, the Australian public is of the opinion that Lindy herself is the murderer. This lynch-mob atmosphere is fueled by the press, which insists upon crucifying the Chamberlains in print on a daily basis. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this comedy, a group of former Cub Scouts (Louie Anderson, Richard Belzer, and Richard Lewis) get together for a reunion over twenty years later and land themselves in a mess of trouble when a deranged convict (John Goodman) takes them for FBI agents. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

In this arch sci-fi sex comedy-cum-action extravaganza, a hard-nosed female mercenary helps a hapless yuppie find a new body for his robot girlfriend in the post-industrial wasteland of the American Southwest. In the year 2017, what little remains of civilization feeds off the scrap heap of 20th century waste, while even casual sex has become a matter of regulations and contracts. Like many other members of the L.A. white-collar elite, Sam Treatwell (David Andrews) takes refuge in a quasi-marriage with his beloved sex robot, Cherry (Pamela Gidley). After a soft-focus, bubbly sexcapade short circuits Cherry's body, Sam considers replacing her, but the shoddy production values of modern robots make it obvious that the vintage appliance is irreplaceable. To put it simply, the guy's in love. The wistful romantic therefore heads out to The Zone, a forbidding no man's land, where he hopes to find a new "chassis" in which to insert Cherry's unique personality chip. To do so, he needs the help of a "tracker," and E. Johnson (Melanie Griffith) is just the woman for the job. The gun-toting, red-headed road warrior leads Sam through a dystopian desert landscape full of psychopaths and opportunists toward their final destination: an abandoned warehouse full of antique androids. Along the way, Sam learns what it's like to interact with a woman who has brains and a heart instead of a microchip. Filmed in 1986, Cherry 2000 didn't receive its limited theatrical release until 1988, the same year star Griffith received an Oscar nomination for her role in Working Girl. Griffith and director Steven de Jarnatt previously worked together on the pilot for the 1980s revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Ben Johnson, veteran of many a Hollywood Western, appears as E. Johnson's mentor, Six Finger Jake. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

This futuristic drama offers the classic story of Shane seved up with a few Mad Max moments and some interesting twists. The tale is set in the smouldering, decimated post-World War III town of Meridian, where locals scrabble to keep their meager farms watered in the midst of a desert wasteland. Bad-guys - a powerful landowner and his cronies - try to monopolize the precious local water supplies by bullying, kidnapping and even murdering citizens. To this beleaguered place comes the enigmatic swordsman/ warrior Nomad who has come in search of his mentor's killer. The town takes him on as their "Peacemaker" and he is able to end their problems and get his revenge to boot. The story was filmed on location in the deserts of South Africa. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Mark Lindsay Chapman (no relation to the murderer of John Lennon) stars in the made-for-TV The Annihilator. If the title sounds faintly reminiscent of The Terminator, it might just be more than a coincidence. The plot involves an army of mindless automatons, programmed to kill, kill, kill. Chapman plays a reporter whose efforts to halt the robot army are flummoxed by the fact that he himself is a fugitive from the law. The Annihilator premiered on April 7, 1986. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In a slapstick spoof of hitmen and crime stories, the head of a security systems company (Hamid Dana) is bumped off by two gonzo exterminators (Brion James and Paul L. Smith) who have gone from stomping out pesky varmints to stomping out human targets, and one of them does so with gusto. Now the exterminators go after the partner who hired them and his blatantly obnoxious wife (Louise Lasser) and in the meantime frame a poor security guard (Reed Birney) for the murder of the company boss. The tale is told in flashbacks, as the security guard has been tried and convicted and is shown at the beginning, about to be executed. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

When an attempted political coup in Northern Italy fails, most of the mercenaries hired by the coup leaders disperse. Not so Martin (Rutger Hauer), who intends to rob his duplicitous former employer Arnolfini (Fernando Hillbeck). Martin is able to raise his own army by using a stolen religious artifact as a talisman. He later kidnaps Arnolfini's prospective daughter-in-law Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh),who saves herself from gang rape by feigning eternal devotion to her captor. Weeks of plunder and destruction follow, with a deadly plague thrown into the stew. Flesh and Blood has also been released under the title The Rose and the Sword. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide