By David Dent
At the core of this increasingly violent and anarchic movie is the plight of the contemporary male and the choices they make whether to be good or bad, angel or devil.
When all round nice guy Pastor John Bishop (Michael Lombardi, also one of the movie’s three directors) lets his teenage daughter Sarah (Katie Kelly) borrow the car to go to a Christmas party, it’s a decision he’ll live to regret. Stopping at a petrol station, she witnesses shouts coming from the boot of a car parked next to hers; inside is Arlo (Bryan Alvarez), who has been stuffed there by the psychotic Ram (Joseph Gatt) as the result of a drugs deal/turf war between two gangs. Sarah has seen too much and can’t be allowed to live.
John is apoplectic with rage and grief when he learns of his daughter’s death and determined to track down Sarah’s killer. Along comes gruff detective Jed (Marc Menchaca) with a solution; if he could leave the Pastor alone with Sarah’s murderer Ram for one minute, what would John do?
The Retaliators runs a number of stories together, including shadowy underworld figures trying to recover stolen drugs and money, and the fate of a number of America’s most notorious killers. But this is really about John, who preaches peace – an early scene has him backing down from a guy who has taken the Christmas tree he reserved, turning the incident into a Christian parable – but is faced with a series of moral obstacles that convinces him that in the face of violence, more violence is an option. “When a sinner goes unpunished, he is only free from man’s law. When man’s law fails, god’s law prevails,” John quotes to his congregation; by the end of the movie, he will have assumed the god role.
What the film also seems to be saying is that the world’s a tough place, and ‘manning up’ is the answer. And the world of The Retaliators is a very tough place indeed; the last half an hour takes us down some dark roads with almost cartoonish levels of gore and mayhem, which left this viewer wondering just how seriously we were expected to treat the movie. Most of the characterisation is similarly broad (and the women are either strippers, mothers or junkies), although Gatt’s Ram is a great menacing creation, a cross between The Terminator and Pluto from The Hills Have Eyes.
Bloody Flicks 