A horror-ble mess

Here's the thing about introducing Danny Trejo to the post-modern Summer of Action: despite being indisputably awesome, he's pretty much only been used as a character actor. Something about not a lot of leading parts for a burly, craggy-faced Mexican who has been in not one, not two, but, yes, three different prisons. So perusing the netflix inventory for Trejo movies is kind of a frustrating experience: it's not Gary Daniels or Eric Roberts where you find a lot of stuff that looks perfectly terrible and is likely direct-to-video but where at least Gary is one of the two 'stars' of the film. And its certainly not like pretty much any of the other Expendables where you clearly know the movies they're in and their faces are slathered all over the posters.

However, in Nightstalker, I thought I'd found one. Here's the cover:

Whoa. Creepy looking mexican dude is half of the cover. In the little 2000 px preview on netflix, I figured that was DT, and that I would get to watch a movie where big, scary Danny Trejo plays a crazy serial killer with some mysterious pale skinhead side. Or maybe he'd be a cop who hunts down a skinhead killer.

Well, the second option was clearly wrong: the movie is described as being about Agent Martinez (played by Roselyn Sanchez who a) is rather attractive and b) you might recognize from Without a Trace, not that I do but I knew her face from somewhere), an LAPD cop on the tail of a dangerous serial killer who 'girds herself when she learns the killer is coming after her' or something like that... bottom line is that the netflix summary actually used the word "gird" so that was fun.

It took only a moment to see that the first option was also wrong: early in the movie we learn that DT is Martinez' partner. Bummer. He does get to be a great 80s cop: he's of Mexican heritage and from LA so he's blatantly racist, just like the city was back then (now its just overtly so). Also, he gets to do coke. Go Danny.

So here's how the movie goes: it sucks. The killer is some kind of schizophrenic. You see that pasty, toothy freak in the right half of the poster? Well, thats the guy who makes our antagonist want to kill. Are the murders grisly? Are the images disturbing? Is there a dark subtext to everything that's being depicted? Nope. Does this crummy director go to the stupid lazy horror tradition of going to jumpy images and rapid, awkward, screechy transitions to 'elevate tension', causing the viewer to have no idea what the hell is going on and also making a short, marginally climactic scene supposedly very scary and dramatic? Yup. Does this ruin what is otherwise a perfectly good 'chick on the case kind of as an affirmative action thing chases down the killer and shows the white and black guy what's what' story? Well, if that story was any good I'd say yes.

Well, no greatness here. But it was fun to see DT snort some coke off his hand and wonder if maybe, just maybe, it actually was coke...