Kill Squad (1982)

There is a particular corner of early-1980s American cinema that makes no apology for itself, and Kill Squad (1982) sits comfortably in it. Directed by Patrick G. Donahue, this 85-minute action picture belongs firmly to the grindhouse tradition: low-budget, high-energy, and entirely unconcerned with critical approval. The premise is the kind that gets scrawled on a napkin and then somehow becomes a finished film. A businessman is attacked, left in a wheelchair, and his wife murdered. His response is to call in a group of Vietnam veterans and former associates, and the whole thing escalates into a running series of martial-arts confrontations. The tagline, "12 Hands… 12 Feet… 24 Reasons To Die!", tells you more or less everything you need to know about the film's ambitions and its sense of humour about itself. Whether you find that charming or exhausting will shape your entire experience of the next hour and a half.

Patrick G. Donahue is not a name that appears in many film studies syllabuses, and Kill Squad is a fairly representative sample of the independent action pictures that were filling drive-ins and fleapit theatres on both sides of the Atlantic during this period. The production was made without the backing of a major studio, which, in practice, meant tight shooting schedules, non-union locations, and a cast drawn largely from martial arts practitioners rather than trained actors. The principals, Jean Glaudé, Jeff Risk, Jerry Johnson, Francisco Ramírez, and Bill Cambra, are not household names, but they were presumably hired for what they could do with their hands and feet rather than their emotional range. That is worth bearing in mind when the dramatic scenes arrive. For a sense of how varied 1980s cinema could be at the other end of the prestige scale, it is worth glancing at something like Re-Animator (1985), another film from the decade that knew exactly what it was and leaned into it, or the altogether more polished but equally genre-committed The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), also reviewed here.

Grindhouse pictures like Kill Squad existed in a specific ecosystem. They were not made for cinemas that served wine and printed programmes. They were made for audiences who wanted action on screen within the first ten minutes and did not want too many pauses between the fight sequences. Compared to something like The Raid 2 (2014), reviewed elsewhere on this site, the choreography is rough and the editing unpolished. But polish was never really the point. There is a long tradition of films that function perfectly well as entertainment without functioning particularly well as cinema, and Kill Squad is a reasonable exhibit in that case. Whether it crosses the line from enjoyably rough to genuinely tedious is the question worth sitting with, and it is one that splits audiences pretty cleanly along the lines of tolerance for this sort of thing. Compare it to the elegance of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and you are practically comparing two different art forms that happen to share a genre label.

Every workplace conversation descends into a multi-man brawl. Ah grindhouse. Where would my life be without grindhouse. The acting, scripting, fight scenes... damn near everything about this film is Hammy and low budget. But that's the charm. You know you're going to watch something that is essentially shit... but still entertaining.

I think that captures it fairly well. There is something almost refreshing about a film that has no interest in pretending to be more than it is. Kill Squad knows its audience, it knows its budget, and it plays within those limits with a kind of unpretentious commitment. It is not a film I would reach for on a quiet Sunday evening, but put it on with the right crowd and a bit of patience for the rougher edges, and there are worse ways to spend 85 minutes. Sometimes a film just needs to do what it says on the tin, even if the tin has been dented and left at the back of the shelf.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1982  | Watched: 2025-05-19

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)