Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

I’m going through the process of ditching my cable television with the plan being to use Over-The-Air HDTV and Internet TV exclusively which means I have to clean off everything that I have saved on my DVR. A lot of the stuff on that DVR is from the MGM-HD channel, which I’m gonna miss because they’ve showed some obscure and strange stuff, most of which I’ve never heard of. Like this movie ‘Midnight Heat’ shot way back in 1996 and starring former All-American University of Oklahoma linebacker Brian Bosworth. Out of respect for Brian we aren’t going to mention his subsequent NFL career. The odd thing about this movie is that it looks like it’s the follow-up to Bosworth’s ‘acting’ debut ‘Stone Cold’ which was a perfectly fine, stupid action flick but there was a five year gap there. Based on ‘Stone Cold’ alone The Boz should’ve been a 90’s, low budget action stalwart, easily as good Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson or Olivier Grunner, though admittedly a half-step below Gary Daniels. I’m thinking somebody somewhere along the line completely mishandled Bosworth’s movie career thinking he was going to be the next Arnold or something, and that wasn’t going to happen. Sad, because The Boz could’ve been The Guy. Based on ‘Stone Cold’ that is, not this mess.

John Gray (The Boz) is the nicest, goofiest and dumbest banker on the planet earth. So stupid is John Gray that he has no idea that blithely listening to ones walkman and walking out into on-coming traffic during rush hour can result in sudden death syndrome. When John finally comes around at the hospital a couple of days later he has no idea who he is and he has no idea why he’s married to this woman (Marta Dubois) who is a good fifteen years older than he is. It’s not so bad because even though she’s ancient, she’s still kinda hot and better still she appears to be loaded to the gills when we first get a look at their palatial Arizona estate. At first John didn’t want to tap that because he didn’t know who she was. Then he realized that was stupid.

Then the nightmares start. John keeps flashing back, in black and white, to another time. A time when he had slicked back hair, smoked a stogie, had a bitchin’ tattoo, had a hotter younger girlfriend and kept shooting Brad Dourif over and over again. Turns

out that John Gray is actually Wayne Garrett, an ex-con super badass who used to work for dapper Thomas Payne (Dourif) and his Crew of Bank Robbers until Payne killed the woman he loved. In flashback it looks like Wayne Garrett might’ve been a clever badass but the guy we know, John Grey, is a complete idiot. He had all these horrible flashbacks about all these horrible things that happened to him in the past but he does remember a phone number. He calls this number, tells the guy on the other end who he is and where he is, with this place happening to be Payne’s hideout. See what I mean? Now he has another dead woman he loves on his hands.

Undaunted, Grey leaves his gutted up wife behind and heads to L.A. to get to the truth. There he meets another plucky woman (Claire Yarlett) who is earnestly applying to be the third dead woman in this movie. Still completely baffled and confused Grey will engage in a large number of car chases and fire fights and fist fights, amazingly surviving these events despite the fact he has yet to remember the majority of his previous badass skills. Is any of this going to stop him from killing every single person in this movie? No sir, no it is not.

Without going out on a limb here, were going to first say that The Boz is no actor. At least in ‘Stone Cold’, whatever shortcomings The Boz might’ve had as an actor were picked up by that awesome multi-toned mullet he sported in that flick. Without the mullet to distract us we had to focus on The Boz alone for this movie and for whatever reason the powers that be thought it would be cool to have The Boz try and ‘emote’. If the director told Brian to look distraught, he looked confused. If they told Brian to have a revelation, he looked confused. If they told Brian to look upset because he has just discovered his wife gutted up in a bath tub, he looked confused. If they had let him keep the mullet we wouldn’t have noticed any of that.

The story that they setup was pretty interesting, if not completely derivative of way better movies, but with Bosworth’s looking befuddled throughout the entire movie and also making the criminal mistake of giving Brad Dourif almost nothing to do, we had better hope the action in this action flick can carry us through.

It didn’t. It wasn’t terrible action or anything but it was typical 1990’s action featuring run, shoot, hide, blow up and do it all over again and again and again and as you can imagine that got mighty tedious mighty quick.

In retrospect, having Brian Bosworth walk through the movie looking stupid, considering he doesn’t look all that bright to begin with, was a bad mistake. Should’ve had him get hit by that car, have the bad guys come to town after seeing his picture in the paper and then just have stuff blow up from there. Completely throw out the whole amnesia thing. Brian Bosworth can’t act but he can look pissed off and angry.

It’s a crying shame I tell you because the man had great potential. If they had put The Boz’s career in my hands back in the early 90’s I would’ve personally seen to it that he became the Next Olivier Grunner for sure. Or The Next Billy Blanks at the very least.