What Not To Watch: Face of Terror
Face of Terror is not only the name of the film I’m going to talk about today, it would also accurately describe my facial expression as I watched this movie unfold.
In the Crackle description it mentions that Rick Schroder traded his “silver spoons” for “silver bullets”… this made me think he was going to be battling werewolves, instead he battles Eric Balfour, who is playing a terrorist. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Balfour did not have a dialect coach for his “terrorist accent” as Saleem Haddad. Don “The Dragon” Wilson was more convincing as a Native American in Terminal Rush than Balfour is as a terrorist in Face of Terror.
And let’s talk about faces for a minute… Rick Schroder plays a cop with the LAPD who goes over to Spain to track down his sister, Isabel. Rick Schroder was 34 when this movie was released, but he still looks like he’s a teenager in the movie. The bad mustache did not fool me into thinking he was a grown up. I mean if his time partnering with Andy Sipowicz was not enough to make me believe Schroder as a cop, a bad mustache isn’t going to get the job done.
The two main story lines in the film intertwine with one another, as movies are prone to do. After experimenting with drugs and partying hard, as models are prone to do, Isabel nearly falls of the grid, but you’ll never guess who is there to help get her clean and sober… that’s right Saleem. She would have had to have been high to not suspect something was up with that accent.
The other big part of the story is that there’s been a series of bombings in Spain… bombings that Saleem is responsible for.
Saleem had a tragic event take place when he was just a boy when he saw his sister murdered. We get to see this in flashback form, another thing movies are prone to do. This horrific event was the catalyst for Saleem’s terrorist ways.
Saleem’s uses beautiful women to unknowingly carry his bombs (in briefcases) and then he detonates the bomb using a remote. I guess the logic is since his sister died violently, these women he fools into helping him should die violently too and take out other innocent people in the process?!
Apparently the producers did not feel that Schroder and Balfour were enough star power to carry this film so they called in another Hollywood heavy hitter in the form of Kadeem Hardison. But Kadeem’s asking price must have been so high that they couldn’t afford to both pay him and send him to Spain with the rest of the crew, so we just see him in scenes talking to Schroder’s character, Nick Harper on the phone and basically saying the same thing about the police captain wanting him to come back to the States so Internal Affairs can ask him some questions and how he can’t stall much longer. There had to be at least three scenes in the movie like that.
Maybe if this movie was about a cop played by Rick Schroder hunting down a werewolf played by Eric Balfour, I would suggest you watch it… but it’s not a cop hunting down a werewolf movie and it is also a movie you should not watch.
