Review of Riot on 42nd St.

Tough ex-con Glenn Barnes (stiffly played by stuntman John Hayden) gets paroled from prison after serving a sentence for manslaughter. Glenn plans on reopening his old nightclub the Garage on 42nd Street. Vicious rival nightclub owner Farrell (a deliciously atrocious performance by Michael Speero) threatens to take drastic measures if Glenn goes through with his plan. After all the employees get massacred by Farrell's flunkies on opening night, Gleen reverts back to his brutish criminal ways to exact a harsh revenge on Farrell and his men. Writer/director Tim Kincaid, who also blessed us with such enjoyably putrid stinkers as "Breeders" and "Robot Holocaust," delivers yet another delectably dreadful doozy of a low-rent nickel'n'dime trashfest: the cruddy acting, pitiful dialogue ("I'm a professional -- I ain't gonna do no lapdancin'"), erratic pacing, crude cinematography by Arthur D. Marks, badly staged action scenes (the massacre sequence in particular is uproariously awful while the fisticuffs are likewise unintentionally sidesplitting in their jaw-dropping ineptitude), cheesy syncopated synthesizer score by Maggie Torre, faulty continuity, and tacky excessive gore are all every bit as hilariously horrendous as they ought to be. Token name thespian Jeff Fahey mostly just stands around as hard-bitten detective Frank Tackler, Frances Raines vamps it up as Farrell's brassy moll Barbara, and hulking behemoth Carl Fury snarls and sneers a lot as nasty musclehead thug Remy Wyler. Lovably pathetic stand-up comic Zerocks pops up as himself to tell a bunch of amusingly lousy jokes. A handy helping of tasty gratuitous female nudity, the bouncy rock soundtrack (the theme song seriously smokes), and plenty of choice footage of Times Square in its supremely seedy 80's heyday further add to the infectiously scuzzy fun. An entertainingly schlocky gut-buster.