It's nice when a film gives you warning of its quality well before you're committed to watching it. In this case, the fact that Hulk Hogan plays a starring role should be enough.

The name might make you think of ninjas, or assassins, or similar things to that, but hey -- it's Hulk Hogan, who would be very hard pressed to hide in any sort of shadow at all. So, the Shadow Warriors in this film don't make any use of shadows, or darkness, or stealth at all; they just charge in with guns blazing.

They charge in with guns blazing to capture a drug lord. Then one of their team betrays them, seizes a fortress on Devil's Island, and demands the drug lord's release from prison. To encourage them, he kidnaps and threatens to drown the "All-American Gymnastics Team," a bunch of girls who act far too cutely to be convincing and who all wear leotards, sweatpants, and jackets because that's what gymnasts wear even if they're going on long plane journeys. Cheesy action film fans will no doubt at this point be alerted by having heard the word "gymnastics" mentioned to the likelihood of a hideously contrived scene where a random stuntperson can show off acrobatic prowess (ref. "The Lost World"). One of the few saving graces of this film is that it doesn't go that way.

I don't really need to tell you much more about the plot, so let's just look at a few of the high points. In most cases, it seems like the authors have been so desperate to include an action-movie cliche it's forced in in a way that doesn't make any sense at all.

- The amazing minigun. The amazing minigun is a cardboard tube. Whenever it's pointed at someone, there's a flash cut, a loud sound of multiple shots, and people writhe and die. The filmmakers, for some reason, decided that to make this look convincing they would NOT make it look like the minigun was rotating, or that it was smoking, or that it was discharging shells, or anything like that. No, they decided instead to stick a zippo lighter in the end. It looks absolutely ridiculous.

- The amazing bombs. Just about all the members of Hulk's team have little bombs that look like they were made with homebrew electronics kits. They also carry walkie-talkies that detonate the bombs. Numerous times, the film can't be bothered to have the foresight required to SHOW us where people are planting the bombs, so instead, one of the team just LOOKS at an item, hits a switch on the walkie-talkie, and it blows up. Even more stupidly, there's one moment when one person has set no less than FOUR bombs at four points down a corridor. When an enemy is running down the corridor, he sets the bombs off ONE AT A TIME, ALWAYS SETTING OFF THE ONE IMMEDIATELY BEHIND THE ENEMY. Why not just set them all off? Or set them off in reverse order so he runs into them?

- The girl. Shannon Tweed, to be precise. She starts as a deep-cover agent who rescues Hulk from the baddies and joins him on the mission in the fortress. She seems to be incapable of keeping her shoulders covered for any length of time. When she's hiding out and sees an enemy, she decides not to shoot him even though she has a gun; instead she decides to strip to her bikini and saunter right up to him, because of course the armed criminal will of course not think there is anything wrong whatsoever with a bikini-clad woman being in the middle of a fortress where no women at all were supposed to be (because women never get involved in crime!) and gawp at her pointlessly, enabling her to kick him in the head and take his gun, which of course she didn't need since she had one anyway.

- The sharks. Devil's Island is apparently surrounded by sharks. Earlier in the film, Hulk gets bitten by a plastic shark and wears its tooth around his neck. We are hinted at many times that Hulk doesn't like sharks and that they're going to be a problem. Then we get a cut of Hulk and the others swimming straight through shark-infested waters, being seriously ignored by every shark present, and that's the end of that subplot.

- The helicopter attack. The villains send a helicopter to shoot up Hulk's house. When he hears it overhead, he is outside with Shannon and another friend of his. When they first hear the chopper, they don't think of looking for it or anything like that: instead they STAND STOCK STILL AND STARE AT EACH OTHER for at least five or ten seconds so that the chopper has time to open fire on them. The chopper pilots then ignore the fact that the people have fled and decide instead to destroy every single piece of garden furniture Hulk possesses, enabling us to get multiple shots of glass tables exploding and plant pots breaking in half.

- The final sequence consists of an intercut between several bits: one group looking for the girls, a gunfight outside, and Hulk fighting a bad guy on a roof. For the fight on the roof, the same shot of the bad guy missing a kick and Hulk hitting him in the crotch is repeated at least twice. The outside gunfight appears to be absolutely pointless, consisting as it does of long sequences of people firing guns with absolutely no apparent effect on anything whatsoever. The fight is only ended when one of the other good guys arrives and blows away the entire enemy group with a rocket launcher that he found in a box he happened to be hiding next to.

- When they finally find the girls, the trap has sprung, and they're in water up to their necks. They try and blow the door up, but it doesn't yield, so they open fire on it with the Amazing Minigun. The water then promptly comes out through the holes in the door (hmm...so where did the bullets go?), and then they blow it up. The water mysteriously stops flowing for no apparent reason.

* The guys then open the cage and start helping the gymnasts out, but when they're next seen, the guys are holding down some captured enemies, and Shannon is walking with the gymnasts. Now, bear in mind they've just been submerged in water up to their necks. What do you think they would do? Get some new clothing temporarily from the heroes, who themselves might pinch it from the villains? Stay as they are and put up with the wet clothes until they're off the island? No. Inexplicably, they decide simply to take off their sweatpants and jackets and walk right past the captured villains in their leotards only, which have remained completely dry. Apparently they left the sweatpants and jackets in the cell, too, because nobody bothers to carry them out.

- The ending. The guys and the girl all TAKE OFF their service badges, and they're told they're going to become a special force (yep, "Shadow Warriors") to deal with whatever the main services can't handle. This makes me suspect this film was a pilot for an even cheesier series.

Rating: 3 turkeys.

Response From RinkWorks:

Oh, that open-ended, "You're now Shadow Warriors," thing totally gives away that this must have been a pilot for a (thankfully) never produced series.