Cross Mission - 1988

First of all, I have to say this movie has the coolest opening sequence OF ALL TIME.  I know that's huge praise.  This deserves it.  There's some mindless action song, explosions, people fighting, midgets, midgets shooting lightning out of their arms, helicopters...all this and it keeps repeating the name of the film "Cross Mission" like 6 times in huge all caps across the screen.  No other credits, no reasoning, just senseless action scenes with music and crazy ass shit going on.

Of course with a beginning of that magnitude, things were bound to slow down, and they do big time.  It's not the worst setup in the world, we've got about 45-50 minutes worth of background story.  General Romero is a evil ruler over an anonymous South American country (this was filmed in the Philippines) and he has some visitors from the UN, William and Helen.  He shows them all the supposed good he is doing, and goes about to send them on their way.  But soon one of Romero's men is having second thoughts and decides to turn on him.

The best part about this is the wacky shit that is going on besides the plot though.  This movie is directed by Alfonso Brescia who did those Star Wars ripoffs.  This one is far more straight-forward than those, but does feature it's own good amount of bizarre shit.  It appears General Romero has dark mystic powers.  Powers which, for some reason, make him able to conjure up a little midget.  The best scene is when he shows this to the UN lady.  She stands there, her horrible acting is great.  She literally has zero reaction.  The guy just conjured up a fuckin midget!  Where is the horror and the WTF face any normal person would make?  That or the immediate burst into laughter....

I love the poster too:

Gotta love the Arabic writing.  This is the only one I can find online, I can't find a single one that is only in English.

Between the lags in plot, there is mostly mild action-violence.  Small gun fights and whatnot featuring some US soldiers versus the South American troops.  Not a lot is said or really matters in regards to why this is going on.  It's just a reason to get away with calling your movie an "action" movie.

In the end of this one, the weirdness factor was pretty minor and never really as cool as the opening sequence.  Also, it was never explained - gotta love that!!  We ended with a film that had a better opening than actual film, and I had my hopes up.  True story, after I saw that opening I determined I was not in the right mood to watch a movie that "good" and decided to come back to this later.  But I'd gotten my hopes up.  I got back to it, only to discover it wasn't good, and then the damage was done.  So I guess my point is that this movie wasn't good.  But it also was fun and dumb, and I still had a good time.  So I give it 3 stars.