Eye Candy #175 - "Desert Heat" (The Damme #2)

Desert Heat: Another entry into The Damme’s oeuvre. This film, from 1999, was directed by John Avildsen, who won the Oscar for directing “Rocky”…and now he’s been reduced to a Damme movie, moving the wildly successful emotionally manipulative pictures of his early and mid-career to the bad, emotionally vapid films of today. This one stars the Damme as Eddie Lomax, a wandering desperado who is waylaid somewhere in the American southwest by a group of rustic criminal hillbillies (or whatever the desert equivalent of a hillbilly is) who steal his motorcycle. So it’s time for Eddie to get him some vengeance. With production values straight out of a made-for-cable movie, “Desert Heat” is as flat and boring as part of its namesake (the film‘s alternate title is “Inferno“, and watching the picture does feel like some kind of divine punishment). Throw in a bunch of character actors like Larry Drake, a young pre-”Earl” Jaime Pressley, Pat “Mr. Miyagi” Morita (who previously worked with Avildsen on “The Karate Kid” parts 1-3...or lost a bet or something), and Danny Trejo, who is a serious contender for the “Worst Portrayal of a Native American Ever Committed to Film”, and you get a really, really terrible picture. Woodchuck sez, “More of exactly what I was expecting. No surprises here.”