“Silent Rage” (1982)
Imagine the situation. Scientists invent a serum that can turn a person into a superhuman. Improve their regenerative abilities, increase physical strength, and so on. The drug hasn’t been tested on people yet, so the inventors themselves don’t know what the effect will be.
But they are terribly curious to find out. So they find a test subject. A psychotic brute who hacked two innocent citizens to death with an axe. Then they look surprised when the brute, whose blood now courses with the serum, turns into an invincible maniac and starts sowing chaos left and right.
But the scientists are lucky, because nearby, Chuck Norris has appeared in his natural habitat. The vast expanses of Texas stretch around, a sheriff’s star glitters on his chest, a mustache bristles under his nose, and a damsel in distress (an ex-girlfriend who is now his current one) demands his protection.
Meanwhile, the killer is asking to be eliminated. After first intimidating a gang of bikers in the “Old Blues” bar to warm up, Sheriff Dan Stevens opens a hunt for the escaped creature.
A kind of Frankenstein’s monster, responsible for unexpected slasher episodes – episodes that are even more unexpectedly reminiscent of Resident Evil. In the end, Norris predictably engages the giant in hand-to-hand combat and even almost wins.
Almost – because the horror concept of eternal evil was gaining momentum, and director Michael Miller didn’t deny himself the pleasure of throwing in a corresponding twist at the end.
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“Lone Wolf McQuade” (1983)
The best Chuck Norris action film with a “neo-Western” prefix, one that most fans would unhesitatingly take with them to a deserted island. The silhouette of a ranger in a hat against the backdrop of the blazing sun is a purely mythological image, the embodiment of the Old West spirit, the personification of the rebel-loner archetype (with wolf-like habits). The authorities insist that a ranger should be a worthy citizen and family man. And J.J. McQuade rushes to protect a daughter threatened by a karate champion (David Carradine) who is involved in gunrunning. But he doesn’t accept others’ authority and instantly boils over when he catches a young woman trying to clean up his shack.
At the same time, J.J. doesn’t bat an eye when bullets kick up the gray dust of the prairies under his boots. And this sweaty, unshaven man is the flesh of the Texas earth’s flesh: it’s no wonder the scum who intend to get rid of him bury him alive along with his faithful Dodge Ramcharger (just as battered and dusty, but pushing through against all odds).
The final melee involves soldiers with rocket launchers, machine guns, and grenades, but the fundamental question of who beats whom is settled by the irreconcilable enemies the old-fashioned way. Face to face, fist to fist. After Silent Rage, Chuck decided to minimize the number of romantic episodes. But in Lone Wolf McQuade, even the love scene, where McQuade and his lover fool around in the mud, dousing each other with a garden hose, turned out marvelously.
“Missing in Action” (1984)
You can take the soldier out of Vietnam, but you can’t take Vietnam out of the soldier. Especially when that soldier is Colonel Braddock, who suffers from PTSD and the realization that 2,500 military personnel are missing in action in Southeast Asia. At first, he tries to move on, spending his days watching Spider-Man cartoons.
But soon, he joins an official delegation sent to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to determine if any POWs remain in Vietnam. Braddock himself was also a prisoner. And he escaped successfully.
Now he escapes from blustering politicians and launches his own investigation. An investigation that leads him to seedy Bangkok and jungles teeming with unfriendly elements wielding various weapons.
“You’re absolutely incapable of being diplomatic,” they tell Braddock, and Chuck Norris, in one of his most notable roles, proves this through his actions. Causing a ruckus on the Thai streets, fighting off hitmen time and again, he blows up an enemy camp and sprays a truck convoy with machine gun fire.
Before that, he manages to complete a couple of stealth missions, crossing, for example, from one building to another via wires. Missing in Action is the most testosterone-fueled Chuck Norris action film, and the thanks partly go to James Cameron. In the early 1980s, his screenplay for a Rambo sequel was circulating around Hollywood, sending Sylvester Stallone’s character to Vietnam to search for POWs. While Sly was rewriting Cameron’s script and George P. Cosmatos was preparing for filming, the shrewd producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus quickly stepped in and blew up this story into a whole Chuck Norris duology.