After watching Michael Madsen in ‘Bloodrayne’ you may have thought ‘Wow, Madsen really doesn’t give a damn about what he attaches himself to, does he?’   But then you stumble across an old copy of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ or a new copy of ‘Sin City’ and then you think ‘Wow, I forget what a daring and challenging actor this guy can be.’  But then, again, you run into something like ‘UKM: The Ultimate Killing Machine’ and then your heart goes out to Mr. Madsen who apparently has sick parents, or crazy back child support, or is trying to feed kids in Africa and his sister Virginia isn’t willing to toss in a few bucks to help out.

Nonetheless, whatever Mr. Madsen’s reasons for appearing in this awful film, I watched every single stinking minute of it and now I am contractually obligated to speak on it.  Actually, UKM starts out fairly slick with Delta Force soldier Sgt. Dodds (Simon Northwood) signing up for some whacked out experiment run by karazy doctors Lena (Deanna Dezmari) and Stroheim (John Evans).   Seems these two, being overseen by Major Blevins (Madsen), are attempting to create the ultimate soldier.  Note though, and I could be mistaken here as this could be some alternate branch of the military that I’m not aware of, but if this is the Army, and if Blevins is a major, then the leaf on his lapel should be gold and NOT silver.  Silver leaves are for Lieutenant Colonels, but don’t let a few lousy facts get in the way of a good story I always say.  Anyway, the experiment goes terribly wrong as Dodds pops some guys head like a grape and they are forced to shut him down.

From here the movie drops like a mob witness wearing cement sneakers in the Potomac.  We meet four 4F recruits, total losers, who are now recruited for the UKM

program, for some really vague reasons.  Something to do with Dodds being too powerful a soldier and them needing weak losers to experiment on or something.  So they shoot these four losers up with various amounts of the UKM drug, and then one of the guards at this facility decides he wants to molest crackhead recruit Zoe (Victoria Nestorowicz), Of course she’s injected with UKM and she beats the hell out of the dude.  Our overseers are ecstatic that this dude is getting kicked to death because that means the drug is working, but they become less ecstatic when the four new UKM soldiers grab the soldier’s key card and start roaming the facility halls.   Apparently they didn’t think too far ahead on that one.  To make matters worse, Dodds, who was being held chained in basement, is out as well and has killing on his mind, and he’s horny too.  Don’t ask.  So UKM then becomes a survival monster movie with the crazed Dodds stalking the halls seeking revenge with our four loser recruits caught in between trying not to get killed in the crossfire. 

There is almost nothing any good in ‘The Ultimate Killing Machine’, from the tired forced, and ultimately ridiculous story, to the complete lack of any kind of excitement or scare, fun, or humor or anything!  I don’t know what this movie is supposed to be classified as.  Let’s call it an action flick since there are some guns, and people run through the halls screaming some times.  I know acting isn’t easy.  The best actors have the ability to make it look that way, to be sure, but bad actors bring to light how truly difficult a craft acting is to master.  All potential actors should probably rent this as a primer on how NOT to act.  But then given what these young charges have to work with as far as a script goes, I guess you can’t be too hard on them.

Why oh why oh why can’t these things be better?  And as bad as the movie itself was, the fake rock music that pulsed throughout this mess was probably the worst thing about the whole production.  A bad movie I can enjoy on some level, but bad music, especially loud bad music, pisses me off to no end.  Yo, Virginia, next time you see Mike, and I know he listens to you and respects you, tell him to chill on this will ya?  Or at least lend him a few bucks so he can pay his child support, huh?