Angel Town (1990)

People are voting emotionally.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Angel Town's DVD cover may be misleading....but martial artist Olivier Gruner is the star and central plot of the film. Gruner (who also starred in the excellent Nemesis) plays a foreign exchange student who has to protect a family from a nasty gang of hoodlums. Gruner shows off some excellent fighting skills and throws out some classic cheesy one-liners. But Gruner's acting is HORRIBLE! His English sounds like a drunk Van Damme. But you're not watching this for it's great acting and dialog...you're watching this for it's kick butt martial arts action....which it has plenty of. There is a great final fight scene and the gang violence scenes are pretty shocking and realistic. The soundtrack is early 90's gold and the film has a great 90's lowbudget vibe. Excellent rental for martial arts fans!

Oliver Gruner is totally unknown to me. My friend showed me this film because he had seen Gruner in, what he called a pretty good sci-fi film, Nemesis. So as we watched this, we found ourselves fastforwarding through the BS drama parts just to get to the unbelievable action sequences. Gruner loves to kick and kick and kick. And kick! hahaGruner character is a graduate student who is forced to stay in a ghetto close to the one that he grew up in. He finds himself watching after the boy who lives with him because he really wants to join in the Mexican gang that keeps tormenting his family. Instead of joining up, Gruner tells the boy to fight back (against a gang? too crazy). Gruner plays a typical Van Damme character who kills everyone (or maims them pretty bad) and works to rid his block of these gangmembers.The plot was very cheesy and easy to think of. Gruner is probably not very well known because of his script-choosing if this movie is anything to compare possible choices to. This ghetto is pure hell and I enjoyed seeing the motley crew of characters go through it as if they have a chance against Gruner's character. The music was typical action music (thumping pianos and timpani, swelling guitars) which actually wasn't as bad as I make it sound. The director really needed to keep the action going instead of taking a break every 5 minutes for a tense family moment.Ultimately, I gave it a 4/10 because it really tried to be an average action film for Oliver Gruner to star in, but the overall feel of the film leaves you wanting more closure on what you just saw.

Olivier Gruner stars as Jacques a foreign exchange college student who takes on and single handedly wipes out a Mexican street gang in this obnoxious and racist film which is so horrible that it's laughable. Bad acting, bad plot and bad fight choreography make Angel Town a Turkey.

Angel Town is an excellent example of a bad bad film: not just so bad its good, or so incompotent its funny, but so bad it is really, really bad. The action scenes are boring, the acting is elementary school level at best, and the production values are non-existent.Olivier Gruner was being promoted as some kind of martial arts champion around the time this film was released here, but I've never heard anything about him since. I'm not surprised about that, really, because he has even less personality than Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal, which is saying quite a lot. Needless to say, Gruner has never made it to the A-list since then.The editing on this film is attrocious. I think they used the same footage of Olivier and the gangbangers running down the same alley way at least six times. The cinematography is so flat and dry that it looks like it was filmed using an old Betamax video camera from the 1970s. The story is strictly by-the-numbers.All in all, don't waste your time. Go out and rent a Van Damme or Seagal film instead. At least they appear in films where the director, editor, and screenwriter know what the hell they're doing.