A gang of thieves pull off a daring heist in a casino and the chief Inspector (Stuart Whitman) sends police Captain Sylvester (Hugo Stiglitz) to go after them. While they’re on the lam, the thieves split up and go their separate ways. One group is killed by the cops, and the other breaks into the house of a wealthy family and takes them hostage. They demand a plane to make to their getaway, and the Inspector eventually relents. Predictably, things don’t go as planned.
Not to be confused with the Steven Seagal flick of the same name, this surprisingly sturdy action thriller from Mexico’s master of exploitation, Rene (Night of 1000 Cats) Cardona, Jr. sort of plays like a South of the Border variation on Desperate Hours. It’s one of those movies that’s a bit better than expected at every turn. Cardona gives us lots of scenes of controlled chaos as there are tons of shootouts (including a brief gun battle in a movie theater) and foot, car, boat, and plane chases aplenty. The scenes inside the home are appropriately suspenseful, and the interactions between the thieves and the hostages are legitimately tense. The finale is equally strong as the film sort of morphs into a mini-disaster movie when one of the family members is forced to land the plane when the pilot gets shot by the kidnappers.
Whitman spends most of his screen time sitting behind a desk smoking a stogie and barking orders while Stiglitz does a lot of the heavy lifting. Hugo even gets his own Dirty Harry rip-off scene where he jumps aboard a hijacked school bus. The gory way the hijacker gets dispatched in this sequence was worth an extra Half Star in my book. Both stars are quite good and Francesco (Sorcerer) Rabal, Marisa (Diabolik) Mell (who has a couple of brief nude scenes), and Antonella (The Gates of Hell) Interlenghi, who play members of the kidnapped family, do fine work too.
Whitman starred in the awful Guyana: Cult of the Damned for Cardona the previous year.
AKA: Panic Makers. AKA: Hostages!
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