Reaction & Review | Panther Squad

Welcome, one and all, to "Full Moon vs. Troma" here on Reaction & Review. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna be starting up a brand new themed marathon for this series. Because for the next couple of months, I'm gonna be covering movies from two of the most well known indie film studios out there today. And I figured why not pit these two against each other in a head-to-head competition to see which studio comes out on top in this marathon? Now each week, I'll be covering 8 of their movies in a rotation cycle. 4 movies from Full Moon Features, and 4 movies from Troma. Basically, I'll start with a Full Moon movie tonight, then next week will be Troma's turn, then another movie from Full Moon, then Troma, and etc. And I'll repeat this cycle until the end of April. Now there's not gonna any be any 'point' system for this marathon. It's just gonna be a simple competition, mostly because I wanted to highlight both of these indie film studios for this marathon.

So anyway, let's start this marathon off on the Full Moon side of things by taking a look at a movie from 1984. That movie is "Panther Squad". Now unfortunately, I don't have a lot of information about this movie. I only know 2 things about it. I know that the star of this movie goes by the name of Sybil Danning. I know that, because she's on the poster and the DVD cover that I currently own. And secondly, I know about the plot to this movie. In which for some reason, a bunch of environmental terrorists are holding an astronaut hostage. And to save this astronaut, the world leaders have to call upon a bunch of female mercenaries called, ironically enough, the Panther Squad in order to save this astronaut.

Now, I have no idea why world leaders needed to enlist some random female mercenaries for this mission. Nor do I have any idea as to why environmental terrorists are holding some astronaut hostage. I am hoping, though, for the movie to make some sense of this. I'm also hoping for this movie to be decent, but I have no idea if it will be. The only way I'm gonna find out if this movie is any good at all, is if I shut up, and I push play, and I'm gonna do that right now. So, without further ado, it's time to kick back, relax, and check out "Panther Squad".

6 minutes later

So let me see if I understand this. This terrorist organization that calls themselves "Clean Space" claims that they have taken the pilot and the space chief hostage until their demands are met. And by demands, I mean that the entire space program must be cancelled completely. And yet, even though they say that they have them hostage, we don't really know if that's the case or not. Because the only thing we saw was just the name "Clean Space" popping in and out on screen. I'm not making any claims that they don't have them hostage, but it would've been nice to see if they actually DID show the pilot and the space chief being taken hostage by this terrorist group. Just saying.

9 minutes later

Christ, this guy's acting is fucking terrible. I understand that it's probably just the accent, but I've heard other actors with accents that don't sound as wooden and as terrible as this. This acting, at least from him, is shit.

6 minutes later

So, guys, we just got through with our first fight scene involving our main character. And I can safely say that it was probably one of the most poorly choreographed fight scenes I have ever seen. It was three random dudes who, for no actual reason, start to pick a fight with our main character. And most of it was done in slow-motion while also recycling the same footage as if it was suppose to 'epic' or some such shit. I'm kinda hoping the fight scenes will get better as the movie goes along, but just based on that one lone fight scene, my hopes are pretty low on that.

11 minutes later

Wow...that fight scene was almost as bad as that first fight scene from earlier. Plus side is, we don't have any slow-motion or recycled footage, but it didn't help things when the terrible editing got involved during this one. I swear to god, guys, this movie better improve on these fight scenes soon. Otherwise, I'm not gonna be very happy. Well, I'm not happy with this movie to begin with, but it'll make me more unhappier than I already am, if that makes any sense.

19 minutes later

You know, guys, I will say one thing about this movie. The music that they got here is actually pretty decent. Granted, it's just standard 80's rock music, but I still think that what is here is still kinda catchy. It's kinda sad that that's only positive I can garner out of this movie is that the music is decent, but still, I'll take ANY positive I can get out of this movie at this point. Because this thing has been boring as shit for quite a while now.

The Review

Well, guys, that was "Panther Squad". And the movie just ends, because it doesn't have any ending credits, so it just brought me back to the DVD menu screen. Oh well, it doesn't matter. I'm just gonna shut the movie off now...OK. What the fuck do even I start with...? Well, I can start off by saying that this movie lied on it's runtime. Because on the back of the DVD case, it states that this movie is 74 minutes long. However, that is not the case. The actual runtime is off by 3 minutes, meaning that this movie is actually 77 minutes long. I know that's probably a stupid thing to bring up, but I would've liked it better if this DVD didn't lie about it's runtime. Mind you, those extra 3 minutes didn't really help the movie, but still. A little bit of honesty is what I would've liked to seen.

But anyway, setting aside the trivial matter about the actual runtime of the movie, let's actually get into the movie itself. Let's talk about "Panther Squad". I'd like to say, first of all, that this movie claims to be the coolest and trashiest action movie of the 1980's. And it sure as hell lives up to being trashy, so at least they got that much down. Cool, however, is something that I personally wouldn't describe this movie. Setting aside the fact that this movie is mostly just a cheesy action flick, the actual writing for this movie is kinda shit. So I brought up earlier about how this movie was about some astronaut being kidnapped by some international terrorist organization called Clean Space. And their demands are that they shut down this space program that was set up by N.O.O.N. Which in this movie stands for the New Order Of Nations. And once they shut down the space program, they will let the hostages go. Basically, if you couldn't tell by the terrorist group's name, they want to stop this space program so that space wouldn't be polluted like how Earth is. Which OK, it's kind of a stupid plan, but at least it's something that helps sets up a plot. I was kinda afraid that, maybe, that this movie was gonna shoehorn in some bullshit message about how we should stop polluting, but thankfully, this movie doesn't go down that route. So, at the very least, I can spare them that much.

That being said, this leads into the biggest problem with this movie's writing. Mainly, it's the unnecessary amount of padding that this movie has. Because once we get established with our plot, and from the time that we first get introduced to our main character, Ilona, the entire story just comes to a complete stop, because this movie has a LOT of padding. To begin with, we don't actually get introduced to the actual Panther Squad up until well over a half an hour into the movie. And I probably wouldn't have minded any of that if the actual members of the Panther Squad had any sort of personality to their characters. Which they didn't. Mind you now, I am not expecting serious character depth from an action movie, especially one that claims to be a trashy action movie, but I still would like a reason to care about any of these characters. Hell, they don't even get names in this movie. The only name I really know of is Ilona, which is Sybil Danning's character. And even she barely had any personality to speak of. The only thing that she mentions at one point was that she was a former football player. Although I don't know if that was suppose to be a joke or not, because shortly after she says that, she kicks some guy down in a bar after a pointless bar room fight happened. I'll talk about the fight choreography in a bit. There's also another character named Frank who is just kinda there to be comic relief, but none of his scenes were all that funny.

But going back to the padding for a moment longer, because I got off topic when talking about the characters. There's one scene in this movie that is the definition of padding. So, there's a scene where 3 of our terrorists are escorting this woman, who I THINK is suppose to be the kidnapped astronaut from the beginning of the movie, but I'm not sure if it was her or not because she looked nothing like her. But anyway, the terrorists are escorting her to their base of operations, but their jeep gets caught in some sand, so they gotta get out and push it. She's still in the jeep, which gives her time to crawl to the front of the vehicle and grab a gun before running. And from there, it's about a 6 minute chase scene that goes absolutely nowhere! First off, everybody in this scene runs incredibly slowly. Especially considering that the woman was wearing HIGH HEELS this entire time. Yet, for some reason, the terrorists were having trouble catching up to her. I think it would've made more sense if the woman took off her high heel shoes before running. But whatever, I am not someone who is an expert on women's high heels, so what the hell do I know? But yeah, this entire chase scene goes absolutely no where. It goes on way too long, and it just ends when she gets captured. I could maybe understand if she had escaped her captors was able to get away from them, but no. It just ends when she ends up getting caught by one of the captors before we cut back to something else that's suppose to resemble a plot.

I'm just gonna sum it up like this, guys. The writing here isn't really good, but the padding in this movie makes it far worse than it should've been. Coupled with the fact that it has some of the worst fight scenes I've ever seen from an action movie. And you know what? I normally would jump ship into acting next, but I need to talk about the fight choreography next. To put it simply, the fight choreography in this movie is a fucking joke. Nobody in this movie looks like they've ever been in a fight in their god damn lives, and it shows. Our Panther Squad throws out punches and kicks that wouldn't even hurt a child that's about 6 or 7 years old. But somehow, they're able to knock down these terrorists with about one or two punches and they're knocked out just like that. They have some of the weakest punches I have ever seen thrown on film. How weak you may ask? Well, to give you a slight comparison, if you were to pit these women against the women's roster from WWE's Attitude Era and Ruthless Aggression Era, both of these rosters would beat their asses, hands down, because of how weak they fight in this movie! That's how bad they really are. And I used that comparison, mostly because some people would consider women's wrestling during those era's to be the weakest point. Mind you, I personally disagree with that, but I'm not going to get into that discussion here. So anyway, going back to the fight scenes for this movie, these fight scenes are not just excluded to our Panther Squad. All of the fight scenes in this movie are boring, incredibly rushed, and just really, really poorly choreographed. Hell, guys, I'm almost tempted to say that this fight choreography is almost as bad as the shit I watched in "The Russian Ninja". I don't know if it's worse than that movie's fight choreography was, but it sure as hell comes close. So yeah, the fight choreography in this movie is a fucking joke.

Now, I skipped over acting, and I may as well get into that before I forget about it. Simply put, the acting here is not very good. Most of the actors in this movie have accents that make their acting sound wooden and robotic as all hell. And again, I should mention that I've heard other actors with plenty of accents, but this movie is showcasing the worst of it. I think part of the reason why is because some of this acting was dubbed in, and it's poorly dubbed in too, I should mention. Now aside from them, the only actors who I think marginally tried were Sybil Danning and the actor playing Frank. Those are the only two who kinda try in this movie. They're not great, mind you, but at least they marginally try here. There's also one more actor in this movie who I could make mention of, and he's suppose to be the main villain of this movie. Mind you, we don't see him up until the last 10-15 minutes of the movie, but that's beside the point. He's suppose to be an evil general with some retarded plan that kinda ties in with the Clean Space plot that I mentioned earlier. Now the reason why I'm bringing him up is because his acting has 2 different ranges: Overacting and underacting. He will play both out in one scene where all of the villains have gathered together, and he gives out some sort of speech that causes both of these acting ranges to pop up. And in both cases, he will either whisper his lines, and then suddenly SHOUT HIS LINES LIKE THE WAY I'M TYPING. And it just makes him sound kinda goofy, and somewhat laughably bad. I didn't get a laugh out of it, personally, but I could see someone else getting a laugh out of it if they're really curious about watching this movie.

There's really not much here in terms of special effects, outside of one thing that I'm not going to spoil too much, because it makes no god damn sense as to how or why it happens, but let's just say it involves one particular gun that Ilona uses towards the end of the movie. And I will say that the effect involving this gun looked rather cheap, but then again, considering that this is a low budget movie, I'm gonna give the special effects a bit of a pass here. What I'm NOT going to give a pass to, though, is the editing. Jesus Christ, the editing in this movie is horrendous! Most of it involves the fight scenes. And most of them involve Sybil Danning. Because whenever she has to be in a fight scene, the editing will play a horrendous part by switching back and forth from the bar room to Sybil fighting this one Asian guy for...some reason. He might be one of the terrorists, but it's never really confirmed. And aside from the choreography being terrible, it's also just quickly done just like that. Also, during some of these fight scenes involving her, there are some REALLY odd distortion effects going on during these scenes where it's recycling the footage to show her fighting out of a hold. And it's not the only time that this happens. It also happened during one bit of the movie where Sybil manages to shoot a pilot from a helicopter that, somehow, ends up crashing and exploding. Which sounds really cool...except the footage is distorted in a way that makes these shots look really grainy and blurry as shit. Which leads me to believe that when Full Moon was doing it's HD transfer for this DVD, some of the footage looks like it might've been screwy to a point where someone over at Full Moon fucked on up the transfer. But I could possibly be wrong there, and maybe it couldn't have been saved, even with the HD transfer. However, it still doesn't stop the editing in this movie from being complete shit.

Camerawork, minus the shitty editing, is OK, except for some fight scenes, where the camera will zoom on certain shots of the fights for some bizarre reasoning. I don't know why it's like, but it just looks terrible. Lighting here is perfectly fine. But then again, this movie was mostly filmed outdoors during the daytime, so it would make sense that the lighting here would be fine. Sound-mix here is OK, minus some bits of it sounding like shit. The music is, honestly, the one and only thing that I can say was actually pretty good here. Again, it's just standard 80's rock music, but I really enjoy that genre of music, so I can say most of, if not all of the music was rather decent.

Ultimately, guys, when all is said and done, am I able to recommend "Panther Squad"? Um...no, I really can't. The only two ways I can recommend this thing is if you either like seeing scantily-clad women fighting (poorly, mind you), or if you want to riff on something with friends on a bad movie night. If that's your thing, then you'll probably find something redeemable about this movie. But for everyone else, no. This movie sucked on a whole host of levels. Granted, I don't think it's worse than shit like "The Russian Ninja" or "2020: Texas Gladiators", but it's still really fucking bad. The fight choreography is garbage, the editing is shit, the acting is not very good, there's almost nothing here, unless if, maybe, you also like trashy action movies with little to no plot. I personally didn't get a whole lot of enjoyment out of this movie, so that kinda leaves me out on watching this thing a second time. And I did want to like this movie, because it was something I was kinda interested in watching some years ago. However, I have learned, much like with this series, that sometimes curiosity can be a real bitch. And that's an example of what this movie is. Now...I'm gonna go and watch something better. And seeing as how this movie had really poorly done fight choreography, I'm gonna go and watch a movie that has the exact opposite of that. I'm gonna go and watch my copy of "Bloodsport". Because that movie certainly has some awesome fight choreography. So I'm gonna go and do that next, after I'm done putting this review together. And hopefully, next week's movie from Troma doesn't start off in a bad way like this movie from Full Moon did.

Anyway, guys, with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all later. Peace.