The recent death of Sonny Landham has got me thinking about the tough guy actor’s film career, and the various films he had done. He was probably best known as Billy, one of the commandos who gets hunted by an alien in the original Predator, a film that was top-heavy with super-charged testosterone-laced actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, and former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura. Landham, like other hard working actors, also did many other films, such as 48 Hours, Southern Comfort, and Action Jackson. But the movie that I remember Sonny best from was a cheapie independent film known as Fleshburn.
Based on the novel Fear In A Handful of Dust, by Brian Garfield--who also wrote the original Death Wish novel that the first Charles Bronson film was based on--Fleshburn deals with a native-American Vietnam veteran named Calvin Duggai who escapes the mental institution he has been committed to so he can exact revenge on four psychiatrists who testified against him in court. It seems that when he was in the military, Calvin got into an argument with several of his fellow soldiers, and as a result, he left them to die in the middle of the desert. It does appear that our boy Calvin has some issues.
And Calvin is not done expressing himself. The first twenty minutes of the film is spent showing Calvin relentlessly abducting all of the psychiatrists who testified against him, including Earl Dana (Macon McCalman), the husband and wife team of Jay and Shirley Pinter (Robert Chimento and Karen Carlson) and former shrink and now park ranger Sam McKenzie (Steve Kanaly). Calvin stashes the shrinks, all bound and gagged, in the enclosed cargo section of his pickup truck until he gets them out to the middle of the desert, where--barefoot and underdressed--they don’t have much hope of surviving. The shrinks wind up having to fight nature, as well as Calvin, in their quest to survive. Much hijinks ensue.
Fleshburn was originally released in 1984, but I first saw it on a rental VHS tape sometime in the 1980s. Much later, I picked it up on DVD in one of those bargain bins for a cheap price. Doing some research I discovered that it was first released on DVD back in 2001 by Rhino Home Video. The DVD, now out of print, is very bare bones, with no extras nor even closed captions. The film is presented in a full screen, ‘pan and scan’ style, and is much clearer than I remember the VHS being.
As far as the film itself…well, it’s not very good. The pacing is as slow as molasses. And the film suffers from a split personality, as if director/co-writer George Gage didn’t know if he wanted to make a straight-up thriller/revenge flick, or a drama that deals with serious “issues” and the movie ultimately winds up pleasing nobody. It lacks the relentless, always-charging-forward energy of better action films like Rolling Thunder or Death Wish, and whatever drama there is comes off as sappy and soap opera-ish, offering nothing to advance the story. Sonny Landham, while clearly playing the villain here, still manages to be as intense as his character should be. But even his presence is not enough to elevate Fleshburn, which should probably be avoided much like a real life flesh burn. Thankfully there are much better films in Sonny’s career that a viewer can enjoy. --SF
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