No Surrender Cinema: Mean Guns
What would our Actionversary be without us talking about a film from a bonafide legend among action movie enthusiasts? The works of Albert Pyun have been discussed at great length over the years here at Bulletproof Action, including our Ultimate Albert Pyun Countdown that narrowed our favorite works of Mr. Pyun down to just 10. One of those films is making it’s return today to be the focal point of the latest No Surrender Cinema! It’s kill or be killed when 100 of the deadliest criminals are locked down by crime lord Ice-T, which means it’s time to bust out the Mean Guns!
Let me start this off by shouting out Ice-T, who enjoyed a nice run of starring roles in the action genre in the 90’s. The man is a rap legend (and it’s fitting that he’s a topic of discussion here given that it’s the 50th Anniversary of Hip-Hop), appeared in not one, not two, but THREE of my favorite Cannon Films, and continues to entertain me to this day given that I’m a sucker for Law & Order: SVU. T often found himself playing bad guys as much as he played good guys, and in Mean Guns he portrays Vincent Moon, the kingpin of a criminal empire that has just constructed a new prison. It might seem odd that the type of people who should be behind bars are the ones footing the bill for a new prison, but it’s all a cover for Moon’s ulterior motive: the day before the prison is set to open, Moon invites 100 people that he feels have wronged him to the site with the intention of pitting them against each other. Rather than get the blood on his own hands, Moon has decided to let his rivals kill each other off, allowing them access to weapons and ammo and promising a $10 million dollar prize for the final three survivors. If anyone tries to escape, they’ll be met with a bullet from one of the snipers who are set up around the prison grounds.
At arrival time, Moon is on hand to watch everybody set foot inside the facility. The group of his soon to be captives include Lou (Christopher Lambert, whose bleach blond hair makes him look like he just came from the Memento audition), who has a young girl waiting for him outside; Ricky (James Wellington), a killer who doesn’t take kindly to excessive swearing; Ricky’s associates Marcus (Michael Halsey) and “D” (Kimberly Warren); Cam (Deborah Van Valkenburgh, whom many will known as Mercy from The Warriors but who will always be Jackie Rush from the classic sitcom Too Close For Comfort to me), who was turning over evidence that would incriminate Moon’s syndicate when she was captured, and the duo of Crow (Thom Mattews, aka Tommy Jarvis from my personal favorite Friday The 13th film, Jason Lives) and Hoss (the incomparable Yuji Okumoto, aka Chozen from the Karate Kid/Cobra Kai franchise). That’s a pretty badass list of guests for Moon’s little gathering, not to mention the 90-something others who he has an axe to grind with.
After an impassioned speech explaining the rules, Moon’s goons dump bins of guns, bullets, and baseball bats down to the crowd of “players”, and the game begins! Guns are cocked, locked, and loaded, and while some begin fighting for survival at a frenzied pace, Lou rather stoically begin eliminating those around him. While he dispatches a bunch of his nameless peers, Hoss and Crow combine their efforts to hit a home run off of another guy’s head, and Moon himself opts to join in the fun and put bullets in a few people. Before you know it, the ranks of the underworld have thinned out, leaving only a select few (which obviously includes all of the characters mentioned here) to try and be one of the surviving three.
With Cam being the only “innocent” involved in the ordeal, you’d think she’d be one of the first ones to be offed, but instead Marcus chooses to be her guardian angel and follows her throughout the premises. After convincing D to spare Cam’s life, the trio make an arrangement to be the final three and split the money, with the two killers acting as Cam’s protectors. They manage to survive several encounters with groups of other criminals as they look for a spot to take cover in. It’s in this spot where Lou makes his presence known to the group, holding D at gunpoint and proposing an alliance. Although the game calls for three winners, Lou state the obvious that four is better, and they can worry about who lives and dies once they get to the end of the road. Marcus is about to blow Lou’s head off, but begrudgingly agrees to the terms laid out by Lou.
From this point, the focus of Mean Guns is on our makeshift quartet, with some lip service also being paid to another mismatched group, that being Hoss, Crow, and the hooker Barbie, who showed up with her boyfriend and ended up stuck in Moon’s homicidal madness. Everybody else wandering through is just fodder for our main characters, and their distrust for each other and apprehension about their next moves is the driving force for the plot as we approach the film’s climax.
Mean Guns is a pretty fun movie, but Pyun and co. definitely made some interesting choices here. For a movie with so many bullets flying, there’s nary a pool of blood or splatter to be found. The film is full of excessive violence, but typically the end result is what you’d expect from an edited for TV broadcast, not a film that was in heavy rotation on HBO. There’s also a comical scene where Barbie claims what she thinks is a briefcase with the $10 million dollar prize, only for it to be an exploding suitcase. The explosion happens off screen (again, saving on the special effects budget), and instead of being blown to bits, Barbie runs around with her hair on fire and soot all over her face. We’ve had mass casualties up to this point, and instead of giving us a spectacle, Barbie is finished off by something straight out of a Three Stooges short.
A ton of exposition isn’t necessary for a film like Mean Guns, but there’s quite a bit that gets muddled in translation. It seems like Lou’s “daughter” isn’t actually his real daughter, but likely the daughter of previous victims. It also feels like he’s motivated to atone for his sins by his newfound role as a father, but yet he’s the most maniacal out of anyone. He’s also not the most responsible parent, since he lives her to sit outside of the building in his convertible, where she’s approached by various characters several times, and even brought into the chaos by one of them not as a hostage, but as a gofer to help carry out the cases of the cash prize! Another aspect where Mean Guns is meant to feel “different” is the soundtrack; one would think with Ice-T having a prominent role that it might be heavy on the hip-hop. You could also make the case that for a film released in 1997 that some alt rock or nu metal music would go along well with the gunplay. Instead, since Moon professes his love for Perez Prado early on, we get people filled with lead to the tune of mambo music! For a scene or two I’d be fine with it, but after hearing the same song scene after scene becomes a little annoying.
Filmed during my favorite year (1996) in an actual prison that had not yet opened, Mean Guns has a great cast for a VHS era actioner, and a plot that takes the action to the extreme without much of the gore that would normally accompany it. Even wtih a narrowed focus on a select few, there are several red herrings thrown in to make you wonder just who will survive, and the end result may not be as predictable as some would think. If you want nonstop action without much of a plot to worry about, you needn’t look any further than this piece of Albert Pyun’s filmography.
Mean Guns is currently available to watch for free on YouTube, Tubi, and Amazon Prime, as well as a variety of DVD releases both individually and on action compilations.
