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Search and Destroy (1979)

Dir: William Fruet

Vietnam;
A four man escort is sent on a mission to escort a Vietnamese guide, Nguyen (Park Jong Soo) behind enemy lines.
All goes wrong though and the squad, led by Kip Moore (Perry King, "Class of 1984") with his best friend Buddy Grant (Don Stroud), leave Nguyen behind after they get ambushed by the Vietcong.

Ten years later the vengeful Nguyen pops up and starts killing Kip’s squad members. Kip has, since leaving the army, been trying to keep his life together in Toronto, Canada, with the aid of his girlfriend Kate (Tisa “Zombi 2” Farrow).
With two down though Kip and Buddy are the next on Nguyen’s hit list.

The local police, led by Detective Fusqua (George Kennedy) and the arrogant and distrustful Frank Malone (Tony Sheer) are on Nguyen’s trail but Kip knows that the only one to have a chance against the cold-blooded Vietnamese assassin…is himself….

 

Behind those typical , yellow, 70’s credits, so beloved of everything from Grindhouse flicks to “Columbo” TV episodes, there lies in “Search and Destroy” a rather untypical Drive-In revenge flick.

A driving ‘hippie rock’ and early electro score by ’FM’ opens the film with shots of it’s very unusual setting, that of the mighty Niagara Falls. It’s certainly not your typical backdrop to a pissed off ‘Nam vet flick. No Travis Bickle taxi cabs here.
Although the manmade gaudy tourist trap surroundings and faded funfair trappings that surround the natural beauty of The Falls almost mirror the plot’s basic set-up of something alien encroaching upon another environment as in this case Vietnam comes to Canada.

The opening also gives us our main problem with the movie as well though, as Don Enright’s screenplay makes the mistake of killing off no less than half of it’s list of victims almost as soon as the film has started, which means we have a rather uneventful middle section. Things would have played much better if one of the pre-credit deaths had been saved for later as the film features various examples of ‘getting it to feature length’ padding.

There’s a wildly overly protracted cat ‘n’ mouse foot chase to pad things out a bit for example, but thankfully it leads to a really down and dirty, one on one, martial arts slugfest that’s pretty well orchestrated (one obvious non-connect kick aside) and thuddingly violent.
What seems like another attempt to fill time comes in the form of a pointless flashback (much longer than the pre-credit sequence) to what happened in ‘Nam. But we actually learn a little something extra about how things went down and it adds another layer to the supposed grievance of Nguyen. It’s also topped off with a very well acted scene by Perry King as he admits to the high the danger and death-dealing gave him but how that now he wants to leave it behind despite him still missing it.
It’s well written, pretty complex stuff that adds weight to the thin plot.

And indeed Perry King is very good throughout the movie, giving a very complex ‘on the edge’ turn that puts his character above many of the more comic strip vigilante/revenge characters that populate such Drive-In fare.
The ever welcome Don Stroud has a more cliché and expected introduction scene (pulling the kind of faces only Don Stroud can pull) and is given an equally typical ‘brawn before brains’ sidekick role, but the sight if him, shirtless and intense, as he pulls a few Sonny Chiba moves and makes noises like he’s trying to attract a mate is a wonderfully entertaining ‘Trash movie’ moment.
In fact we could have used far more of the always bludgeoning Stroud, especially when he’s playing such a full-on hard case.

In fact (in another moment obviously there to add event to the plot as it is ignored later) Stroud has a great moment when he and King , upon finding out their friend RJ is dead, have a very moving ‘consoling the relatives’ scene where they go to RJ’s Uncle and proceed to smack the hell out of a few guys and wave a pipe in Unc’s face.
Stroud’s Buddy then offers a few gentle words of kindness; “Listen old man, he was your nephew, he was our friend, I wanna know who killed him, understand”!
Blimey! What kind of friends and family are we dealing with here!? That’s the hellish legacy of ‘Nam… man!

Park Jong Soo does a fine job during the action scenes but is given a very one-dimensional character with little dialogue. But when the dialogue he does have is along the lines of “First I find, then I kill”, perhaps it’s for the best.
The less famous Sister of Mia, Tisa Farrow, is given little to do but play a damsel in distress, but her character is at least taken seriously and she has one or two good moments with Perry King’s Kip.

The police are shown to be a bunch of indifferent buffoons who spend more time moaning about who’s got a hamburger and who hasn’t than paying attention to a stakeout. One Hawaiian shirt clad dullard even flashes his police radio while slouching against a shop door slurping his 1000 calorie a gulp soft drink.
Don’t get mugged in this city folks.
Mention of the Cops brings in veteran hit and miss thesp George Kennedy of course, but he’s given little more than an extended cameo here and spends much pf the time simply reacting to events and shouting a bit in his office. Nothing to stretch anything here.

The aforementioned score by ‘FM’ basically hides in the background for the most part and then suddenly bursts into life (most effectively during the ever-essential for such films ‘preparing to kick ass’ sequence) to provide really effective and exciting backing to the (sadly only occasional) action.

And talking of action, director William Fruet (still best known for the Brenda Vaccaro vehicle “Death Weekend”, again with Stroud) does the best he can with the padding aspects, but away from this he gives us some well staged and generally impressive set-pieces and offers some unusual aspects to the action scenes.
The tense finale (or what seems to be the finale) is set in a nicely, unusually for these things, crowd packed amusement park where the many shocked onlookers, as they lick their toffee apples, are suddenly thrust into a very real and dangerous re-run of the Vietnam war as a desperate and angry American soldier goes head to head with an equally desperate and angry Vietnamese gunman.
This sequence benefits no end to the budget spent on creating a heavy police presence and on the large amount of onlookers, creating (though briefly) a real epic feel to the very personal conflict being played out.
Surprisingly though (in keeping with that more down to earth realism Fruet has been striving for) this flashy fire-fight leads to a low key, very personal, sequence where the two men face-off against each other, now totally alone, as the forest near the famous falls stands in for those far away Asian jungles.
The sombre music over the closing credits ends the film in a pitch perfect fashion, though a fashion that must have left many thrill seeking Drive-In patrons rather bemused.

In fact there’s a surprisingly serious attitude, for a 70’s action flick, to death in “Search and Destroy”.
There are lots of little speeches by Kip about no longer being shocked by death because of what he has seen and the opposite view of his girlfriend who, realistically, is finding the whole idea of death, and the threat of death, so close to home hard to face and understand.

Thus we end up with a strange hybrid of Drive-In action flick, macho 70’s cheese fest and well acted serious drama on the effects of violence and war on literally everyone, whether they were actually in the theatre of war or just waiting for the grizzly show to end…to find out it never really has an end.
Not bad at all and worth a look, as long as you know what to expect.

Released by 'Dark Sky' films on a fun 'night out at the Drive-In' double-bill package with "The Glove".