That’s right, baby, more Busey!
Gary Busey is Buck Mathews, a Vietnam veteran who served a stint in prison where he made friends with a Miami mobster. Now he’s back home, only to find the corrupt sheriff is out to get him, there’s a drug-running motorcycle gang calling the shots, the townspeople are all weaklings unwilling to help, and the one friend he’s got in town is just looking to retire and get out. But Buck’s a good guy, and when he sees some of the biker ne’er-do-wells attempting to rape a young nurse, he jumps into action in his busted old pickup truck and saves her from the gang.
Then they come after him. They murder his wife. They traumatize his daughter. They ruin his home. They harass him at his wife’s funeral. And still the sheriff blames him and the townsfolk do nothing. But slowly people start to turn towards him. His one friend on the force gets buddies from outside to watch his daughter, while the town priest begins rooting for him. Buck also calls in a favor with the Miami mob, and they bring him a souped-up pickup with more firepower than a tank, including hidden mortars, machine guns, bullet-proof plating, and wire cabling. With that in hand, Buck begins his revenge, setting booby-traps to thin the bikers’ numbers and either killing or putting them in the hospital. Finally they come for his daughter, and Buck goes all out with his best bud to ruin things for the gang permanently.
This movie includes things like a torture sequence in which Gary Busey shoves a vaseline-covered stick of dynamite up a biker’s ass, uses a string of razor wire to behead a couple of bikers in the dark, knees the town sheriff in the balls, and beats the head biker by smashing him into a mountain of cocaine and then punching him in the stomach as he overdoses from all the white powder he’s just accidentally ingested. And while he’s not quite wide-eyed crazy yet, Busey definitely shows he has the Eye of the Tiger, which proves it is the greatest thing the 1980s ever gave us as it blasts during his big massacre sequence.
Do you like biker villains who can only scream monosyllabicly and grunt to show their hate for humanity? Do you like Ford F-150s that are built like tanks? Do you want to know what small town hick Gary Busey would do if he had friends in a Miami drug cartel? Do you want to see Busey ruin a perfectly good game of bingo and then later ruin a perfectly good arm wrestling match? Do you want to see Busey rope a man off a motorcycle and booby-trap an ancient truck on the side of a busy highway with a butt-load of dynamite? Do you want to see what a butt-load of dynamite actually looks like? Then Eye of the Tiger is for YOU!
Movie Reviews by a Mook 