The Squad is led by Joseph (Jeff Risk), who is attacked by Dutch’s goons in the opening scene. His wife is killed, and he is shot; he survives as an invalid, and gets his right-hand man, Larry (Jean Glaude), to reassemble the Squad, five fellow Vietnam veterans who worked together to survive capture by the Viet Cong, and returned to the United States and became complete scum bags. No, really - there isn’t a good egg in the lot! One cripples guys for loose change; another is a con man trying to scam thousands out of an investor with his promise of a pet bug craze. The one common link amongst the Squaders is they are know martial arts, and use it at the drop of the hat. When you don’t pay the gardener, he starts kicking ass. If you try to squeeze a pimp out of his territory, he will kick your ass. Generally speaking, they don’t really kill anyone, but I guess ASS-KICKING SQUAD wouldn’t have fit on the video box. Almost every scene builds to a kung fu climax - in all, there are fourteen in the movie. At 85 minutes, that works out to a fight scene every 6.07 minutes, an average that would match or top any movie in this genre.

Larry recruits the rest of the Squad, who are eager to leave their dead-end, mostly-illicit professions at the drop of the hat, don some fatigues, and kick some ass in Joseph’s name. Nodding at their military past, they assemble at attention before Joseph, and for about five minutes, show off all their weaponry skills. The scene shows a severe lack of creativity for two reasons: first, though the Kill Squad are all proficient in the use of these weapons, they don’t actually fight with them during the rest of the film; and second, two of the six Squaders use nunchucks! You got your sword, your switchblade, your nunchucks, your sticks, your throwing stars and, er, another guy with TWO nunchucks! You’ve already made the guy with one set of nunchucks obsolete! Can you imagine the inferiority complex that guy must have? He probably can’t look his mother in the eye when he goes home on weekends cause there’s a guy on the Kill Squad who totally showed him up in front of Joseph.

The flimsy plot follows the Kill Squad around town, searching for clues to Dutch’s whereabouts, as a sniper dressed in black follows, blowing them away one by one. The Squad is so simple-minded in their quest, they can’t be bothered to stop the guy picking them off like fish in a barrel. The clues lead to a used car lot, and after the obligatory fist fight (in which even the used car salesmen know kung fu!), the wakka-cha-wakka music kicks in and we’re off on a hell of a chase. After several innocent bystanders are run over, and one car jumps two others conveniently parked side by side in the middle of an intersection, a car crashes into another car, flips, and explodes in midair. If there is a finer movie cliché than impossible car chases, I haven’t seen it.

KILL SQUAD is a pretty simple affair: a chop-sockey revenger with a mediocre cast with mediocre martial arts skills. It’s ugliness lies in its absurdities, the everyone-knows-kung-fu world and the pointless twist ending that makes the fighting pimps and car jackers seem almost lucid in comparison. The only way this stuff could get better is if the other amazing alumnus of the Vietnam War, John Rambo, somehow teamed up for a sequel television series RAMBO AND THE KILL SQUAD. Man why doesn’t Stallone make THAT movie?